On Wed, 09 Aug 2006, Matthew Garrett wrote: > Marcel Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I do not understand why you need choice of venue. Unless we know how > > that venue treats absent defendants, any ambiguous terms in the licence > > and some other things, it looks rather like a licensor trying to get > > some advantage, such as being able to use their usual legal team against > > a smaller defendant and stopping that defendant being judged by their > > own state's people when appropriate. As you note, it isn't usual for > > free software licences to specify venue, as there are other agreements > > which do that. Why is choice of venue needed? > > (Small copyright holder with limited resources, large company with no > business presence in copyright holder's state, copyright violation, but > I think we've had this conversation before)
The choice of venue won't do anything to help in the cases where you allege a copyright violation, unless you also allege a license violation where the violator agreed to the license. If you're a small company going after a big company and the case is clear cut enough to be worth persuing, there are attorneys who will fight for commission, so even that isn't particularly useful. [Plus, we're generally talking about Free Software here, so the ultimate goal of any court challenge is (or should be) compliance, not renumeration. In those battles the SFLC and similar groups are quite capable of helping without the need of choice of venue.] As a final note, the only clearly legitimate case for choice of venue is for defensive purposes, where the licensor is the defendant; but for copyright, patents, etc. the plantiff won't have agreed to the license, so the clause is almost useless. [I suppose it may give you added protection against claims of negligence and similar, but that's about it.] Don Armstrong -- Identical parts aren't. -- Beach's Law http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]