There have been discussions online going back at least twenty-five years now on the question of whether a licence can be covered by copyright. (I do remember at least one such debate during my undergrad days.)
The usual argument against -- from a US perspective -- is to question whether a licence is a creative work. Or sufficiently creative. This is /similar/ to the question of when a patch to an existing code base becomes big enough to qualify for copyright. Most of the debates I've perused (all as they happened) bogged down before they petered out, and I cannot even begin to guess how many -- or how *few* -- lawyers were involved in them or quoted by them. The arguments also covered the fact that most licenses and contracts are based on some pre-existing license or contract. It may not even be possible to create one out of whole cloth. At least by anyone w/ enough legal training to be licensed to practice law. It certainly would be interesting to see the prcedental case law on the subject. And how it compares to the other common law countries. -JimC -- James Cloos <cl...@jhcloos.com> OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
