Re: Is license text copyrightable? [was: Re: Is OSL 2.0 compliant with DFSG?]
On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> However, the courts apparently never uphold claims of infrignement
> based on the use of essentially-identical (boilerplate) legal text
> in other contracts or licenses. (I think there was a case where the
> supplier of fill-in-the-blank forms sued for copyright infrignment
> and lost, but I can't look it up right now.)
That's presumably because they found that the legal boilerplate was
not a work of authorship. [At least, one hopes that is what they
found.]
If the legal text is a work of authorship, then it's copyrightable to
the extent that it is so.
It's really no different from any other work in that regards.
To my current understanding[1], copyrightability works
something like the following flow chart:
Authorship: Y (continue) N (not copyrightable)
The Law: N (continue) Y (not copyrightable)
By Government: N (copyrightable) N (not copyrightable)
[At least, in the US]
Don Armstrong
1: As always, I'm not a lawyer or qualified to have an opinion beyond
that of a layman's.
--
It has always been Debian's philosophy in the past to stick to what
makes sense, regardless of what crack the rest of the universe is
smoking.
-- Andrew Suffield in 20030403211305.GD29698@doc.ic.ac.uk
http://www.donarmstrong.com
http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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