Altering Programs

On 2/10/99, Tyler Ochoa <tochoa[_at_]law.whittier.edu> wrote:
>
> Under U.S. law, the first-sale doctrine [sec. 109] provides that the
> owner of a lawfully-purchased copy may resell that particular copy
> without the permission of the copyright owner. But the first-sale
> doctrine is ONLY a defense to the distribution right; it has been
> expressly held that the first-sale doctrine is NOT a defense to the
> right to prepare derivative works. Thus, if the work printed on the
> t-shirt is altered or modified (by drawing on it, or by any other
> means), then the person doing the alteration has prepared a derivative
> work within the meaning of the statute, and may be liable for
> infringement. There is no express exception for personal non-commercial
> use, unless the alteration falls under the fair use doctrine. Hence,
> my discussion of the fair use case law.

So do you think Mirage means that if I write marginal notes in a book that I own I've created a derivative work and might only be saved if I scream "fair use" loud enough? (This isn't a rhetorical question, or a question designed to make your argument looks silly: I'm concerned that this may be what Mirage means.)

Or that if I buy a computer program and edit the object code so that it'll perform a little differently? (For example, I buy a program that only prints to LPT1, but my printer is hooked up to LPT2, so I modify the object code on the hard drive so that it'll print to my printer?)

What if I do this computer program trick, but I don't modify the code on the hard drive? Instead, I have a little program running in background that alters the object code every time it loads into RAM, by rewriting a couple bytes of RAM?

-Ari

Ari Kahan
<akahan[_at_]netcom.com>