Alec Warner posted on Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:53:03 -0700 as excerpted: > On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> I'd argue that it is impossible to "accept a license" in the >> first place. It is possible to agree to a contract if there is >> consideration on both sides and a meeting of the minds. > > That doesn't mean you didn't / cannot accept, merely that some (all?) > provisions are likely unenforceable in a court of law. I don't think > EULAs have been ruled illegal yet. > >> Copyright says you can't copy something. A license says you might be >> able to. You don't have to "accept" a license to benefit it. A >> license does not restrict what a user can do, it restricts what the >> person issuing the license can do (I can't sue you for redistributing >> my code if I licensed it to you under the GPL). Some licenses are >> conditional - I only limit my own ability to sue you if you give people >> a copy of the source for any binary you give them, and if you don't do >> that I am now free to sue you. > > Have you read the yEd license? I mean it does restrict what users can > do: > "The Software may not be used as part of an automated process. The > Licensee may not reverse engineer, disassemble, decompile, or unjar > the Software, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code of the > Software." > > How is that not restricting what the end user can do? I believe he's viewing it in the context many explanations of the the GPL take pains to explain, namely: Since copyright law prohibits copying (and in some cases, reading into computer memory for purposes of execution has been held to be copying in the context of copyright as well!!) without permission in the first place, it is as rich0 says, COPYRIGHT law that default-forbids doing anything at all with that string of binary data that happens to form the software. As rich0 further points out, licenses modify that default-no state to allow the user some privileges they'd otherwise be denied by copyright law. Many of them, including the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the yEd license, do so conditionally. They allow the privileges IF AND ONLY IF certain conditions are met. In the case of the GPL, these conditions, only apply to distributors, mere end-users are free and clear of all such conditions as long as they don't redistribute to others. Further, the conditions on distributors are designed to ensure that end users of any derived programs get the same rights from the folks that distribute it to them. In the case of most EULAs including the yEd license, by contrast, distribution is simply reserved as a right to the owning company (separate agreements are needed for distribution rights), and permission to copy and use the work under copyright is granted to the end-user only under rather severe conditions. But from the viewpoint of copyright, it's simply an agreement by the owner to give you permission to copy and use under certain stated conditions, thus limiting their right to sue, but only to the extent that you're in compliance with the (in the case of most EULAs, conditional to an extreme) license (which is itself limited by laws that grant various "fair use" rights that differ by jurisdiction). Thus, by this view, a EULA isn't limiting to the user, because all it's doing is granting (perhaps conditional) rights that would otherwise be reserved to the copyright owner only, under copyright law. Someone can thus choose not to be subject to the license, or simply to ignore it entirely. That's fine as long as they aren't doing something that copyright says they can be sued for. But if they are doing something copyright says they could be sued for, and they draw the attention of the owner and/or their legal representatives, then to the extent that the license allows it, it's in their interest to claim the legal coverage of the license to prevent being sued by that owner/owner-representative. Which is what makes relatively liberal licenses such as the GPL so strong. Since they allow so much, with relatively light conditions, it's very strongly in the interest of parties who might otherwise be sued to comply with the GPL instead. With rather more restrictive EULAs, not so much, since the EULA has such strict conditions. In that case, it's far harder to comply with and far more likely that a copyright violator will be violating the EULA's conditions as well, so claiming the protections of the license doesn't tend to help as much, except to the extent that there really is a disagreement about the conditions of said license. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
