On Sat, Feb 05, 2005 at 08:30:17AM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote: > On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 03:05:22PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > And that is why it is *possible* for choice of law clauses to be > > non-free: selection of laws that are intrinsically non-free is no > > different to writing them into the license in the first > > place. Precisely which ones are a problem is a tricky > > puzzle. Certainly selecting for one of the middle-eastern despotisms > > would be a problem. > > As opposed to middle-north-american despotisms? <grin> I'm not really sure about that yet. But there are certainly some more blatant cases that would do it. > It raises an interesting point, though -- could we end up looking > unfavourably at existing licences applied to software where one or more of > the copyright holders lives in a jurisdiction which says "if you breach the > copyright of one of our citizens when you're in another country you can be > sued here"? So what they can effectively do is the same thing as with a > choice of law clause -- launch a suit in their own country against you, > under that rather idiotic (though probably on the books somewhere) > jurisdiction clause, and effectively exile you from ever entering that > country? I think that countries permitting such completely arbitrary crap can be ignored for the same reason that we ignore the eastern despotisms. You just don't want to visit those places, and it doesn't really have anything to do with us. It's different when you're putting it into the license, such that users are agreeing to abide by it. When their agreement is not required, then it's not even a free country, let alone a free license. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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