Lee Hollaar wrote: > > In article [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > >"Licenses are not contracts: the work's user is obliged to remain > >within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised, > >but because she doesn't have any right to act at all except as the > >license permits." [quoting Eben Moglen] > > That might be true IF "she doesn't have any right to act at all except > as the license permits." But as I have pointed out here and in my > comments to the FSF regarding the new GPLv3, that is not the case. > United States copyright law provides a number of exceptions to the > exclusive rights of the copyright owner, including "first sale" as > covered in 17 U.S.C. 109 and the right in 17 U.S.C. 117 of the owner > of a copy of a computer to reproduce or adapt it if necessary to use > it. > > The convenient redefinition of things in the GPL reminds me of a > quote from Abraham Lincoln: > How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? > Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/03/02/20/1544245.shtml?tid=117?tid=123 (Professor Eben Moglen Replies) ----- 5) PHB opinions by Eric Seppanen My boss' boss (who is quite sharp technically as well as an attorney) thinks that the GPL is stupid because it doesn't read like it was written by a lawyer. He doesn't object to the principles and methods involved-- he's just disgusted by the unlawyerly writing. He says it was written by an amateur, not a lawyer, giving the impression that everyone using it is an amateur, and not serious about their work. What would you say to that? Eben: With all due respect to your boss' boss, he may not have appreciated the context in which the GPL is drafted. Most distributors of copyrighted material use a different copyright license for each country in which their work is distributed. That's not feasible for the free software movement: we have no control over the international path that any given piece of code may take, as it is copied and redistributed by its users, and we must therefore do business all over the world on a single license. What would seem good lawyerly drafting to a lawyer in one country might seem like officious or loquacious nonsense to a lawyer in another. Moreover, unlike the licenses written by the legal departments of proprietary content companies, our licenses are meant to be read by individual programmers, who we hope will choose to use those licenses to distribute their own programs. So the GPL is not addressed to lawyers in a single legal system, but to developers in every legal system around the world. Doing optimal drafting for that rather unusual set of needs is plenty serious business, I will say. It isn't work for amateurs. Whether we have been successful in achieving our intentions can only be judged by the results. ------ Got it now? It was written for GNUtians and only GNUtians. And the only legal system where that license-not-a-contract fiction is not a fiction is the legal system of the GNU Republic. regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
