Re: APSL Hidden Nasty's
Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk> writes:
> Now, you don't know the answer here, and neither do I. You don't think
> licenses are enforceable on minors. I find that hard to believe. I
> suggest we wait until someone else comes along who can clear this up.
IANAL, so this possibly doesn't qualify as "cleaning up", but I'd like
to thow in my two coins anyway:
No, a minor cannot accept liabilities, so he cannot accept a
contract that places greater demands on him than if the contract
had not existed.
However, this is not the case for free licenses like the GPL: by
accepting the GPL what you have to accept is not liabilities you
didn't have before - you only have to recognize that the rights
given to you by the GPL have certain bounds.
(And you have to accept not to sue the author over any losses
connected to your use of the program, but I don't think you could do
that WITHOUT the GPL either, because then you wouldn't have any right
to get harmed by the program in the first place.)
One should not use analogies, but nevertheless: consider I paved
a path across my front yard and put up a sign saying "anyone, feel
free to use this path if you don't step on the lawn". The same logic
as in the license case would lead to the conclusion that minors
can't legally use my path because they can't accept the responsibility
of not stepping on the lawn. However, this is bogus, because if the
minor stepped on my lawn even without legally accepting my sign, he
would still be trespassing.
--
Henning Makholm
Reply to: