On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > However, the courts apparently never uphold claims of infrignement > based on the use of essentially-identical (boilerplate) legal text > in other contracts or licenses. (I think there was a case where the > supplier of fill-in-the-blank forms sued for copyright infrignment > and lost, but I can't look it up right now.)
That's presumably because they found that the legal boilerplate was not a work of authorship. [At least, one hopes that is what they found.] If the legal text is a work of authorship, then it's copyrightable to the extent that it is so. It's really no different from any other work in that regards. To my current understanding[1], copyrightability works something like the following flow chart: Authorship: Y (continue) N (not copyrightable) The Law: N (continue) Y (not copyrightable) By Government: N (copyrightable) N (not copyrightable) [At least, in the US] Don Armstrong 1: As always, I'm not a lawyer or qualified to have an opinion beyond that of a layman's. -- It has always been Debian's philosophy in the past to stick to what makes sense, regardless of what crack the rest of the universe is smoking. -- Andrew Suffield in [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
