Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Thu 14th Aug 2008 19:00 UTC, submitted by Moulinneuf
A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Permalink for comment 326965
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-24
Exactly,
IMHO the license restrictions are a contract to be granted 'copy-left' usage rights. If the contract is violated, then there is also copy-right infringement, as no copy-left/usage rights had thus been granted.
The license, as I see it, is the barrier to any utilization of the code itself. Violation of the license is termination of access to the code, therefore further usage should be copyright infringement AND breach of contract. The contract, thus being violated, MAY need to explicitly outline punitives in the event of any given manner of breach.
Each section providing authorization SHOULD/must, therefore, directly state that said authorization is retro-actively withdrawn, and will be actionable within the bounds of the law in the given jurisdiction.
<SoftwareLicense>{
xxx Software License, Ver 1.2
Constitution of Contract and Parties:
...
Terms of Contract:
...
Authorization of Use:
...
Remedies in violation of terms of contract:
...
Legal mumbo-jumbo - jurisdiction limits, etc...
}</Software License>
Hope the law sees things a bit more like I see them, I provide strict controls to prevent, primarily, Microsoft from using the code I intend to eventually release as open-source. The current state would make my provisions valid, yet unenforceable - a sad state.
Of course, I actually intend on collecting actual signatures for some source-usage contracts, but then that really isn't open-source. With open-source I should be able to assign restrictions in one immutable contract ( per source version ), and have it stick. My only requirement would be to remain within the bounds of the law.
--The loon