🚀 go-pugleaf

On 14 Nov 90 23:26:58 GMT, mcb@PRESTO.IG.COM (Michael C. Berch) said:

mcb> tower@AI.MIT.EDU (Leonard H. Tower Jr.) writes:
tower> From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu  (Dan Bernstein)

brnstnd> To paraphrase Michael Berch: The GPL says it's a license, so it's a
brnstnd> license.

tower> This statement has no legal meaning.  It's semantically null for the
tower> purposes of this discussion.  Please ignore it.

mcb> It's not that GPL is a license just because it says it's a license,
mcb> it's a license because its content meets the legal test for being a
mcb> license of copyright.

Oh yes, this is precisely what Leonard Tower was trying to say -- that
it is a (conditional) grant of copy rights. Dan Bernstein was using
license in the sense of 'contract about permission to use'.

	[ ... shrink wrap licenses ... ]

mcb> But the fact remains that as copyright licenses -- grants of part
mcb> of the copyright holders exclusive bundle of rights -- they can be
mcb> perfectly valid.  (If they were not, under what theory could the
mcb> purchaser of the shrink-wrapped software claim any right to use or
mcb> copy the work?)

Ahem. Here I seem to detect some confusion. A shrink wrap license is
presented by its authors normally as a contract, and indeed as far as I
know it does not normally grant any rights to copy -- the reason for
shrink wrap licenses, or software licenses (in the sense of contracts)
in general, is mainly above preventing ownership of the copy of software
from passing into the hands of the purchaser. The intended effect of
shrink wrap licenses is to make the buyer purchase the *license*, not
the software, which remains the property of the supplier.

The problem being that, once the copy of the software has become the
property of the buyer, a large number of provisions on the enforcement
of property rights come into effect, which essentially say that you can
use your copy of a copyrighted work as you want as long as you do not
duplicate it (except for backups, or for fair use etc...).

This is not something that many companies (hoarders!) want to happen --
they want to be able to limit *use* of software, not just its copying
(which is bad enough), and they can only do that by selling the right to
use via a (shrink wrap or not) license, not the software itself.


Inasmuch GNU sw is concerned, the GPL does not limit use in any way --
you can do anything you want with a legally obtained copy of GNU sw. The
GPL does not limit in any way copying either -- you can copy and
distribute copies as far and wide as you want, as long as all software
that you distribute that incorporates substantial parts of GNU works is
also covered by the GPL.

Note that the latter condition is not automatic -- if you distribute GNU
sw incorporated in non GNU sw, the latter does not automagically become
covered by the GPL -- you "simply" are distributing illegal copies of
the GNU sw, and may be asked to pay damages for this. You retain full
copyrights to the non GNU sw (even if I bet that the FSF notion of
damages would be precisely that copyright :->).
--
Piercarlo Grandi                   | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk