I must tell everyone having serious doubts about the utility of omitting (or banning !!!) choice of law clauses. Venue (the competent court) is something different and it could be anywhere indeed, i.e. in the defendant country, but a clear reference to applicable law looks important when the case requests some interpretation. In particular, the European Union law (500 million inhabitants and main contributor to Open Source) applies software copyright in a specific manner concerning moral rights, information due to the public, liability, interoperability (= copyright exception on interfaces, invalidating the FSF opinion that "linking creates a derivative") and other points. I believe that all licenses originated in the EU do have some choice of law provision.
- CeCILL-2.1 (one of the oldest) refers to French law - D-FSL-1.0 (Written by Axel Metzger and Till Jaeger from the Institute for Legal Questions on Free and Open Source Software - ifrOSS) refers to German law - EUPL-1.2 (currently the most used) refers to "the law of the European Union Member State where the Licensor has his seat, resides or has his registered office" (or Belgian law in other cases, knowing that all EU Member State laws are similar because resulting from the same EU directive). So any idea of banning choice of law clauses will raise serious issues, at least in the EU. Best wishes, Patrice-Emmanuel legal expert - www.joinup.eu Le sam. 17 déc. 2022 à 19:25, Lawrence Rosen <lro...@rosenlaw.com> a écrit : > Mike Milinkovich wrote: “Many lawyers don't like them. In my experience > there were lots of lawyers who found the EPL-1.0 USA-centric because of its > choice of law provision and avoided it as a result. E.g. why would a German > automaker want to contribute code under a license that stipulates US law > when they go to great lengths to shield their company from US law? Telling > them that the lawsuit could still proceed in a German court did not give > them much comfort.” > > > > Pam and others, > > Does anyone on here believe that omitting a “choice of law” provision > entirely from a software license will necessarily result in the license > being sent to the licensee’s jurisdiction for court enforcement? How does > that default work? Is it magic? > > > > /Larry > _______________________________________________ > The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not > necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the > Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address. > > License-discuss mailing list > License-discuss@lists.opensource.org > > http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org > -- Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz pe.schm...@gmail.com tel. + 32 478 50 40 65
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