| This is a very charitable interpretation of fair use. >The transformative factor seems rather clear. People want the many altered things and consider it different enough to go out of their way to find it (despite it not reducing their out-of-pocket cost). Is it really that transformative? It might be from a user-privacy point of view, but if consider all parts of the operating system, it's negligible. >The nature of the work is that it is a tool rather than a work of fiction which is also in favor of fair use. This seems to be a misinterpretation of the law. That part of the test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#2._Nature_of_the_copy...) was intended to prevent copyrighting of facts. In this regard, an operating system is probably closer to fiction than non-fiction. I'm not aware of any exception for "tools". >The amount taken is substantial, but it has already been ruled that even 100% taken can still be fair use. It also contributes a great many man-hours of work though which means it wasn't just a blind copy/paste either. Again, if you consider the entire operating system, even weeks/months of effort by a single person would be dwarfed by the millions (tens of? hundreds of?) of man-hours that went into making the entire OS. |