perl.j has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I could not find this info on the website. All I found was the Perl licenses. I do not want to sell them, I just want to duplicate them for my own personal use.
perl.j-----A Newbie To Perl

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Are the Perldocs Copyrighted?
by Marshall (Canon) on Jul 19, 2011 at 22:25 UTC
    perl doc license page Certainly anything you want to do for your personal use is fine. You can do even more than that.
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      But aren't these the licenses for Perl itself?
      perl.j-----A Newbie To Perl
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        The documentation is part of a Perl installation package. With Perl's markup language, pod (plain old documentation), the documentation is just coded into the same file as the program itself. There are translators that run which convert the Perl pod into HTML or perldoc text.

        Go look inside some .pm files that are installed on your system.

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Re: Are the Perldocs Copyrighted?
by JavaFan (Canon) on Jul 20, 2011 at 08:04 UTC
    • Yes, Perldocs are copyrighted. The mere act of creating them means they are copyrighted. Unless the authors (or (former) copyright holders) clearly stated a work no longer has a copyright, or 75 years (number of years may vary over time, and may differ depending on the country) have passed since the author(s) died, you must assume the work is copyrighted.
    • Copyright != License.
    • Neither copyright nor any Perl license forbids you to make copies for your personal use. (Otherwise, you wouldn't even be able to install them (which makes a copy) or read them (which copies them from disk to memory - multiple times)).
    • Whether or not you have the intend to sell is irrelevant for copyright (although it may influence any penalties you have to pay) - it's about distribution.
    • Which "the website" are you talking about? The Perl tarball is authorative, not some website.
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