On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 02:49:19PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote: > On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 11:57:38PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote: > > This comment has just clarified something that's been rattling around > > half-formed in my head for a little while now, regarding Free licences. I > > don't know if it's been raised before, but I think it bears discussion: > > > > "A licence cannot be Free if it disallows actions which, in the absence of > > acceptance of the licence, would be allowed by Copyright law, or imposes > > restrictions not present by Copyright law". > > > > To put it another way (and closer to Brian's wording), if the licence isn't > > simply a grant of permission but requires things of me which I would > > otherwise be allowed to do, it can't be free. > > As far as I (and d-legal, I believe) understand it, to disallow these > things, you need to form a contract (an EULA). Most restrictions which > require this are non-free. > > I wouldn't quite go so far as to generalize it to "all"; it's probably better > to look at the restrictions on their own merits, which will usually also show > them to be non-free (and in a more direct way than "this probably isn't > enforcable under copyright law alone"). Attempting to go being copyright law > is a good hint that something may be wrong, though. The above did not get much discussion; I'd just like to AOL it, and suggest that any license which attempts to prohibit that which would otherwise be legal is non-free by definition. Yes, this will vary by jurisdiction, but that is already true for many of the decisions we have to make (crypto-in-main, the expiration of the LZW patent, etc.). We should come up with a name for this test. Maybe the "Autocrat Test" or the "Dictator Test"? The copyright (or patent, or trademark) holder does not get to make up his or her own laws? -- G. Branden Robinson | Life is what happens to you while Debian GNU/Linux | you're busy making other plans. branden@debian.org | -- John Lennon http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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