Don Armstrong wrote:
The forms of the license are formed and founded in Contract Law. Contract Law is what enables you to make such a legaly binding agreement. Licenses obey the forms of either a contract or a lease or they are not legally valid. [At least, I have yet to year a good argument for why they would be valid.] The specific rights that can be restricted may be curtailed by Copyright Law, Constitutional Law, and/or a myriad of other sections of US Law. Hopefully that's clear now.
When you say the forms of "the license" are formed and founded in Contract Law, are you referring to the GPL?
If so, I can say with certainty that the FSF claims that the GPL is not a contract. I attended their recent seminar on the GPL at Stanford Law School (August '03 See http://patron.fsf.org/course-offering.html ) and heard presentations from Exec. Director Bradley Kuhn and one of their attorneys, Daniel Ravicher, who both were adamant that the GPL is not a contract.
Rather, they want the GPL to free-ride off of Copyright Law and they view the GPL as a Copyright License alone, a license that just happens to be more generous in its terms than most Copyright licenses.
One of the key reasons they say it's not a contract is because they don't want you to be forced to accept the terms of the GPL to run GPL'd software. Indeed, they say you can RUN GPL'd software in perpetuity without ever being bound by the GPL. You're only forced to abide by the terms of the GPL once you start doing something that Copyright Law would govern, that is, once you copy, distribute, or modify the program.
That's why Section 0 says: "The act of running the Program is not restricted..."
Now perhaps this is them searching for a distinction where none is to be found, as many of the attorneys present seemed to believe courts would find a contract to exist here, but I'm just reporting their position to you.
I also apologize for contributing to something of a tangent, but thought I'd offer it as a point of information.
-- Brian W. Carver -- http://rurnt.com/brian ,''`. Try a free operating system at http://www.debian.org : :' : Support EFF! http://www.eff.org `. `' They're defending YOUR rights online! `-