On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 11:34:02AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > >In contrast, if the copyright holder declares his right to terminate the > >license based on a termination clause, there really is no arguing with it. > >At all. It's not just a lawsuit, it's "give up and go home". > > Which is the effective situation we're in with patents.
We are dealing with legal fictions here. Physicists have not discovered patentotrons or the copyright-quark. I am content to regard patents as special because they appear to actually *be* special. That the situation with software patents may be horribly demoralizing at times does not, to me, justify the defeatist attitude that we might as well just invite licensors to write in clauses that let them pull the plug on anyone they want at any time. The legal situation with software is perverse because copyright and patent law have traditionally evolved such that they are held to cover *different* aspects of human creativity. Except with software, the form *is* the method. The content *is* the idea, to a degree much more fully realized than with any other form of endeavor (that I can think of :) ). That things get particularly weird with the copyright regime when patents are held to affect the same works as copyrights is an indictment of the practice of both patenting and copyrighting software, not an indictment of our license analysis practices. These are my assertions. Yours appear to differ. -- G. Branden Robinson | Mob rule isn't any prettier just Debian GNU/Linux | because you call your mob a [EMAIL PROTECTED] | government. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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