considering international protections

[James Miller <James_Miller@Lawyer.com>]

Sam,

Ah... it's nice to have exams overwith...  what an intersting few days of
discussion...

I have to disagree.  I've written on the subject this semester and I think
there are some practical things that would be relatively easy and useful.

One thing we need to consider is litigating an international claim is going
to be a pragmatic headache for anyone without deep pockets.  We need to leverage
the national treatment principles to keep litigations close to home and in
the most convenient forum.  Authors should include a choice of law and forum
clause in their license.  The MPL is the only one really doing that now...

Also something that needs more review is whether the GPL copyleft provisions
in particular will be treated as a condition or covenant to the license. 
If it's a conditiona precedent that you share source to your works then if
soeone doesn't their license is void, otherwise the analysis doesn't stop
there.  Again an issue of how courts may interpret the scope of the derivative
(bad actor) author's rights.

Keep the license in the copyright arena and out of contract law.  Equity
remedies are easier in copyright and for a free software person not interested
in extracting money in the first place they make better sense.

International copyright agreements are drafted for all kinds of intellectual
property; I don't think there's anything fundamental about not being able
to improve on the already solid approaches we have for free software.

Thoughts anyone?

http://www.nihonlinks.com/JamesMiller/OpenSourceMoralRights (For an article
I'm working on related to the topic...)
> On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 02:17:11AM -0400, James Miller wrote:
> > One thing that concerns me about both the GPL and Open Source 
> licenses 
> > in general is that there's undue focus on their treatment under U.S. 
> > law.  We need to consider hte international implications carefully as 
> > well, particularly where moral rights are concerned.  (my view...)
>
> This is definitely a problem.  However, I suspect it's fundamentally
> impossible to create a license which passes legal muster in all that
> many different countries.  This sucks, but is reality.  
>            
> sam th --- sam@uchicago.edu --- http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
> OpenPGP Key: CABD33FC --- http://samth.dyndns.org/key
> DeCSS: http://samth.dynds.org/decss
>
>