On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 07:20:47PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > Ah. I see your confusion now. You really can't legally use the > software without accepting the license, but the GPL imposes no > conditions upon your acceptance of paragraph 0 which grants you usage > rights. You could call this paragraph a "EULA", if you really wanted > to, but there's little point in doing so. > > This is very different from EULAs because with them the end user gets > > *less* rights that normally given by copyright > The rights normally given by copyright are virtually nil; you have the > right to quote it for critical purposes and so on, but not the right > to use it. A "EULA" generally grants you the right to use it. Um, *no*. There are no use rights that are traditionally reserved under copyright law; copyright only addresses copying, modification, and distribution. Use of the copyrighted work, once you have legally obtained a copy of it, is implicitly permitted. EULAs exist in order to give copyright holders *more* power than is accorded them by copyright alone. This is why they all take the form of a click-through or shrink-wrap agreement that the user must *agree* to: without a mechanism requiring the user to agree to the EULA, it has no legal force (and sometimes not much even if there is such a mechanism). -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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