Thanks for the info. I'm certainly no lawyer, so it's good insight.
Now I'd love to know... What's your opinion on the WTFPL?
(tounge in cheek)
On Nov 27, 2012 5:37 PM, "marbux" <mar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Jack Lawson <ajacksif...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Not to drag this on, but I wanted to say that agree with your sentiment;
> > that's why I stick with MIT:
> >
> > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
> copy
> > of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to
> > deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
> the
> > rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
> and/or
> > sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software
> is
> > furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions
> >
> > MIT gets rid of the ambiguity that not having a license causes, while
> > providing that anyone can use the software with no restrictions.
>
> Speaking as a retired lawyer, I'll have to disagree.
>
> As to ambiguity, just saying "MIT license" creates ambiguity because
> there are multiple MIT licenses and they differ. Wikipedia has a good
> discussion of that issue here.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit_license#Various_versions>.
>
> As to restrictions, your clip did not include the restriction that
> begins immediately after what you clipped:
>
> "The above copyright notice and this permission notice *shall be
> included* in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
>
> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
> EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
> MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
> IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
> CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
> TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
> SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."
>
> <tangent>Some of those warranties cannot lawfully be disclaimed in
> many U.S. jurisdictions and a disclaimer of liability for any "action
> in contract, tort, or otherwise" is without legal effect in any U.S.
> jurisdiction I've ever researched. It's to fool those who don't know
> better and a bluff so a lawyer who's handling the receiving end of a
> lawsuit has *something* to talk about. </tangent>
>
> Returning to the ambiguity topic, I've seen countless snippets and Lua
> libraries floating around the web where the author only states that
> the code is licensed under the "MIT license" instead of shipping a
> copy of the license with the code with the author's name and the
> library/snippet's name, so the author cannot even be identified,
> bringing to the fore the issue of whether the license was slapped onto
> the code by the author or someone who had no copyright to license.
>
> A good example is <snippets.luacode.org>, where all snippets are
> licensed in plain text only by a "License: MIT/X11" string, which at
> least has the decency to specify which MIT license the grant is under
> but happens not to be the license Lua is licensed under, which was
> probably the real intent. My favorites there are those linked from
> this page, <http://snippets.luacode.org/snippets/parseIni_142>, with
> an author identified only as "Anonymous User."
>
> And finally, there's the issue of clutter. The MIT Expat License
> (which Lua's developers borrowed but renamed as the Lua License), is a
> lot of extraneous metadata to require people to insert into that
> 5-line snippet they borrowed from your code.
>
> I'd feel differently if the license had been drafted so that it could
> be incorporated by a referencing URL to the license, rather than
> having to be included with the borrowing code. That way you could just
> add a single comment line to the snippet along the lines of:
>
> "-- snippet gratefully borrowed from Delano Developer pursuant to the
> terms of the Bit Conservation License, [url for author's web page that
> displays the license]."
>
> That way, you don't have to cram the snippet with legalese.
>
> I release all of my Lua code that I publish under the CC0 using the
> following snippet:
>
> "-- RIGHTS: This function's author, Paul E. Merrell, waives all
> copyright and related or neighboring rights to this function, pursuant
> to the Creative Commons CC0 Universal relinquishment of rights found
> at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/";
>
> Not as short as the Bit Conservation License reference, but close. :-)
>
> Copyright issues were a lot more simple in the U.S. until the U.S.
> ratified the Berne Convention (treaty) in 1988. Up until then, if
> copyright was not explicitly claimed in the work itself, along with
> the name, city, and state of the author, the work passed into the
> public domain automatically. Now even tweets and a child's note to
> another child sitting on the other side of the classroom are
> automatically copyrighted presumptively, with the copier bearing the
> burden of disproving the presumption.
>
> It's very bad law, grossly over-inclusive.
>
> BTW, to correct a misimpression in an earlier post, thorough research
> went into the CC0 waiver of rights and it is drafted to relinquish
> rights to the fullest extent allowed under any jurisdiction's law. It
> was drafted not to clash with any law. The odds of it being
> invalidated are slim to none, in my opinion. It's excellent legal
> draftsmanship and it relinquishes every copyright or neighboring right
> that can be relinquished wherever it may go. And it is as suitable for
> code as it is for any other "work" within the meaning of copyright
> law.
>
> All in my studied personal opinion, of course, a right to express that
> I regained when I resigned from the Bar Association and retired. This
> does not constitute legal advice, for which you should consult a
> lawyer licensed to practice.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Paul
>
>
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