"Michael K. Edwards" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Sorry about that; I skipped a step or two. Your "unilateral grant of > permission" is not in fact a recognized mechanism under law for the > conveyance of a non-exclusive copyright license.
I'm sorry, can you point me to the statute here? The US statute simply prohibits copying without permission. It says nothing about how permission is granted. Can you point me to a court case which said "that grant of permission is not contractual, and therefore no permission has been granted"? We aren't concerned with a browsewrap or shrinkwrap license; all the cases you point to are about that. Those are about licenses which attempt to take away rights that a person would have had if they had never agreed to the license. Since the GPL only gives you new rights, never taking away any, it's not clear how objections to those kinds of licenses would matter. > There's also no question that the GPL is enforceable (and has been > successfully enforced by Harald Welte in Deutschland) using a "breach > of contract" theory against people who don't release source code to > GPL works when they modify and distribute them. But applying contract > law standards of construction against the offeror, notice and cure of > breach, grounds for preliminary injunction, and all that -- together > with a correct reading of phrases like "derivative work under > copyright law" and "mere aggregation" -- results in a GPL whose > utility as a club against the Wicked Linker is greatly weakened and > possibly (IANALIAJ) zero. Which is, in my personal view, as it should > be. I see, so this is what you're claiming. Since the proponents of the unilateral-grant-of-permission theory completely agree that contract law is the normal rule for the interpretation of such documents, there isn't any debate there. If you only reason for invoking contract law is to say "the license must be interpreted in accord with the standards of contract construction", there is already broad agreement about that point. > There's a world of difference between "we can't link Quagga against an > OpenSSL-enabled NetSNMP because it's illegal; whoops, we already did > so (and a thousand similar things), which means we have to beg the FSF > to un-automatically-terminate all of our GPL rights" and "as a matter > of courtesy to the FSF, we usually make a reasonable effort to obtain > OpenSSL 'exemption riders' where their FAQ recommends them, > irrespective of whether the assertions in their FAQ and related > statements are legally valid". Yes, and we can simply make neither statement, but ask for the rider, make no statements to the FSF about whether our past actions were right or wrong, and if the rider is not granted, stop distributing (which we would do anyway). So this is a tempest in a silly teapot. I'm happy to leave the thread here, since the upshot is a no-relevance-to-important-issues. Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
