On Mon, 08 Sep 2003, Rick Moen wrote: > _Obviously_ the Copyright Act in no wise addresses, let alone > restricts, the ways in which works may be distributed. Be serious. It lists the four ways in which a copyright holder has the exclusive right to distribute a work. Leasing is the type of distribution typically considered for software. Leases follow the forms of Contract Law. What other type of distribution are we talking about here? >> If there is no privity, there can be no contract, therefore the >> rights granted are granted by statute. > > That is a non-sequitur, If the license does not meet the conditions of a contract, the license is invalid, and any grants of permision contained within the license are null and void. You revert to the rights, and only the rights, granted by statue. I'm not sure how I can make that clearer. > Open-source licences such as GPLv2 and the BSD licence are _founded_ > in the assumption that licensors may grant rights above and beyond > the statutory ones, with attached conditions. Of course. The entire point here is that the granting of permisions merely follows the forms of Contract Law. Nothing more. Since nothing in Copyright Law (or any other segment of law that I'm aware of) restricts the rights you can give away, Contract Law allows you to create a legally binding agreement to give away those rights subject to conditions. Don Armstrong -- Miracles had become relative common-places since the advent of entheogens; it now took very unusual circumstances to attract public attention to sightings of supernatural entities. The latest miracle had raised the ante on the supernatural: the Virgin Mary had manifested herself to two children, a dog, and a Public Telepresence Point. -- Bruce Sterling, _Holy Fire_ p228 http://www.donarmstrong.com http://www.anylevel.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
Attachment:
pgpYgRagRu6GR.pgp
Description: PGP signature