X-Loop: openpgp.net
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2000 8:53 PM
Subject: [Freenet-chat] GPL may not hold up in court
> http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,35258-2,00.html describes
> recent legal maneuvering with the "cphack" program, which decodes the
> data from one of those site-blocking programs. To get out of hot water,
> the cphack authors signed the rights over to Mattel, the plaintiff.
> However the original program was released under the GPL, which is intended
> to grant open source rights irrevocably.
>
> Well, it turns out that this may not work. Apparently one problem is
> that the GPL grant of license may not be valid unless it is signed with
> pen and paper:
>
> The law requires "a written instrument signed by the owner of the
> rights licensed."
>
> "This is one of the reasons why the Free Software Foundation strongly
> urges authors of free software to assign their rights to FSF. It does
> them no harm and it provides us with precisely the signed instrument,"
> said Eben Moglen, FSF general counsel and a law professor at Columbia
> University.
>
> "What has happened here is that these gentlemen [may have] left
> themselves open ... because they made no signed assignment of their
> rights under GPL to anybody," Moglen said.
>
> In fact there may be a worse problem, even if the signed document exists:
>
> Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, said that Mattel might be
> able to argue that the GPL is invalid because users don't pay for
> the free software.
>
> "Nonexclusive licenses given for free are generally revocable, even if
> they purport to be irrevocable," Volokh said. "Even if the GPL license
> in cphack is treated as signed and is covered by 205(e), it might still
> be revocable by Mattel as the new owners of the cphack copyright."
>
> "It is unfortunately not quite as solid a case for the good guys as
> the GNU license theory would have at first led us to believe," he said.
>
> Freenet is under the GPL, and as a program which might well face legal
> attacks in the future, you might want to consider doing this FSF signover.
> I don't know if there is a downside, like whether it would somehow give
> RMS control over the project.
>
> Hal
>
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