On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 11:32:06AM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote: > Scripsit Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> >> interface is enough to stop any derivative-work-contagion, so we are back to >> the lone choice of venue thingy, and its rather feeble argumentation on >> debian-legal, full of chinese dissidents and desert islands :) >> The only sane solution and the one i believe is default in international law >> is choice of venue to be the defendants court, either zwhere he is based or >> makes business. > I'm confused about your opinion here. On one hand you seem to feel > that it is OK freedom-wise for a license to have a choice-of-venue > clause stipulating that the licensee must appear in the licensor's home > court in any suit about the software, even when the licensee is the > defendant. > On the other hand you say that the only sane solution is to let the > default rules prevail and have the case take place in the defendant's > home court. > These two do not appear to be compatible (unless you think a license > can be "free" with a venue choice that you do not consider "sane"), so > I must have misunderstood one of them. Could you elaborate, please? If we replace "sane" with "enforcable" (which is what I think the OP was getting at) then they are in fact compatible. A license does not become non-free if it contains unenforcable components, unless it contains a component that specifies that any unenforcable clause voids the whole license. (Or at least, that's my understanding. It may in fact be that unless a license contains a clause that says clauses stand on their own, a single void clause may void the whole license. Australian copyright law contains a specific example of a law that voids a specific clause in a license without recourse or appeal, in the section on reverse-engineering software.) I take no position on the freeness of venue-change clauses. I suspect they are in many places unenforcable, but have no information to say so. -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Paul "TBBle" Hampson, MCSE 8th year CompSci/Asian Studies student, ANU The Boss, Bubblesworth Pty Ltd (ABN: 51 095 284 361) Paul.Hampson@Anu.edu.au "No survivors? Then where do the stories come from I wonder?" -- Capt. Jack Sparrow, "Pirates of the Caribbean" License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.1/au/ -----------------------------------------------------------
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