Matthew East wrote:
<snip>
>...The GPL is a license (hence the "L") by which (among
> other things) the licensor and copyright holder grants the licensee the
> right to use and redistribute the program subject to certain conditions.
>
> A license is a type of contract, in this case between the program maker
> and the user/redistributor.
>
I think the GPL is rather more subtle than that, in that it uses
copyright law, rather than the law of contract. Here's Eben Moglen's
description of how it works (sorry this is a bit long):
########
"Thus, the initial rules for sharing undertaken by the Free Software
community... assumed that only the law of copyright need fundamentally
to be considered. And what was achieved was, within the vocabulary of
the community, a very pretty hack. A hack in the sense that the word is
ordinarily employed in our, if I may call it, our community, an
unexpected result achieved by creative deployment of existing parts in
an unexpected or unusual configuration. The hack to copyright law was
the recognition that the purposes of free software could be achieved by
subtracting from the rights exclusively given to the author by the law
of copyright as it applied to computer software. What the free software
author wanted was actually simply to remove a few pieces from the
existing copyright machine. He didn't need to add anything to it - no
additional obligations needed to be placed on any user of the software,
no additional agreements needed to be gotten from anybody who had a copy
of the software - all that was necessary was to remove some restrictions
- by sharing the copyright status accorded to each author of a computer
program, the exclusive right to control copying, modification, and
initial distribution of copies. Under US Copyright law, that's all there
was, exclusively vested in the author. What the author then wanted was
to give the power to copy and modify away. To remove exclusivity, and to
provide to others what the statute gave exclusively to him or her. With
respect to distribution, the only principle necessary in order to
protect sharing was to say "if you redistribute, whether modified or
unmodified, use these permissions and no other." ... By honeycombing
copyright in other words, by returning to the user some, but not
absolutely all of the exclusive rights vested in the author under
copyright law, the social artefacts desired (the freedom to copy,
modify, and share) could be ensured at the full strength that copyright
law ever ensures the author's rights. No further contractualisation, no
further compulsion, no further form of legal coercion is necessary but a
determination to enforce copyright for the benefit of sharing."
########
That seems to me not contract, but a beautiful and unexpected
inversion of copyright law.
Mac
--
ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
