Re: Choosing a License: GNU APL? AFL 3.0?
On Jan 1, 2008 10:36 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
> A copyright license doesn't need to make anything explicit that
> is already explicit in copyright law.
Okay. So is the preservation of copyright notices already explicit in
copyright law? I haven't been able to find anything about this on
Google and Wikipedia etc., though it's hard to know what to look for
with the question being the fairly subtle one of whether unqualified
permission to modify a file *entails* modification of copyright
notices.
> Some license authors may choose to make some requirements
> explicit anyway, as a courtesy
That's true, but in such cases I normally find qualifying text such as
"your right to ?thing is unaffected". On the other hand it's also true
that this is more often the case for making rights explicit than
making responsibilities explicit.
> I wonder how many other requirements that you care about in
> copyright law are entirely unexamined because you've not seen
> them explicated in any license text.
Well, what other heuristic should I use? I can't justify the cost of a
lawyer for this, so I can only make the best assumptions that I know
how to make, and ask friends and people on debian-legal and so on...
In other words, if you have evidence that's better than mine, please
do tell me!
--
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/
Reply to: