Re: non-English copyright
John Hasler wrote:
>Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
>> - I do not know about law at all but perhaps from a legal point
>> of view only the original copyright is effective and the translated
>> one has only a meaning as a reference at most.
>
>Oliver Elphick writes:
>> That is correct. However, any court outside Japan would need to be
>> given a translation to work from.
>
>I think that a translation of a license is probably binding if it is done
>by the author of the subject work.
In the xengine case, that started this discussion, the author had written
an English licence that was much more restrictive than he meant it to be.
>> ...any court outside Japan would need to be given a translation to work
>> from.
>
>If that translation is by the author's hand and came to me attached to the
>work in question I find it hard to see how a court could fail to hold him
>to it.
So the problem for a Japanese writing a licence in English is to be sure
that it says what he means. It really is essential to get a native
English speaker to analyse the proposed licence to ensure that it says
what it is supposed to say. Therefore it is much better to pick an
existing licence, such as GPL, BSD, Artistic, Eiffel Forum or X Consortium
and apply that, so that no-one is left in any doubt.
--
Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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