On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:35:36PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> George Danchev <danchev@spnet.net> wrote:
> > On Friday 09 September 2005 18:24, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >> But that's already possible. The majority (all?) of licenses that we
> >> ship don't prevent me from being sued arbitrarily. The only difference
> >> that choice of venue makes is that it potentially increases the cost for
> >> me. Within the UK alone, I can end up paying fairly large travel fees to
> >> deal with a court case. But I'll have to pay a lot more for a lawyer.
> >> Being sued in the US wouldn't be significantly more expensive for me
> >> than being sued here.
> >
> > The problem is not only with the expensive funny lawsuit trips, you may find
> > some jurisdictions and local lows quite ... let's say just strange.
>
> That's choice of law, rather than choice of venue. I was under the
> impression that it was generally accepted.
Only insofar as the laws generally chosen are accepted. If somebody
showed up with a choice for Swaziland[0], we might have a problem with
that. But although US law is fairly right-wing, and German law is
fairly crazy, neither of them are actually prejudicial in a fair court.
[0] It's an autocracy (under state of emergency rules for about 30
years, they're currently trying to reestablish some semblence of
democracy); the case would be determined by who paid the
largest bribe to the king. Given his proclivities, that might be
the one with the cutest intern.
--
.''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
: :' : http://www.debian.org/ |
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