On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 08:23:22AM -0400, Michael Poole wrote: > Branden Robinson writes: > > > If an innocent bystander is harmed through the operation of defective Free > > Software, how can he or she be held to the warranty disclaimer, given that > > he or she never received the corresponding copyright license? > > Can you elaborate on the situation you have in mind? I would think > that in general, the liable person would be either the one who put > Free Software in the medical device (construction machinery, etc) or > the one who operated the device (the immediate actor might be an agent > for a company that would be liable). Software by itself is pretty > limited in how it interacts with the world, so it needs some enabler > before its bugs could harm anyone. Er, I think you're reinforcing my point rather than challenging it. The point is that making a warranty disclaimer a condition of the license wouldn't really do much to save the licensor from litigation anyway. As with many license clauses that are attached without much understanding of copyright law, it's either astoundingly overbroad, or almost completely ineffectual for its intended purpose. Whether or not licensor says "ah, quite right -- we'll get rid of that clause, then" when we contact them with this information will do much to tell us whether their intentions are DFSG-free. "If you somehow *do* get a product liability lawsuit started against me in the courts despite my disclaimer of warranty, I'll...countersue for copyright infringement!" Now recall that copyright infringement is a criminal act in the U.S. and increasingly more jurisdictions. Making it a criminal act to sue someone sounds like a pretty ghastly power grab -- but maybe that's just me. At the very least, the Dictator Test may be useful to tell us when we need to contact the licensor to get clarification on the license's meaning. -- G. Branden Robinson | Judging developers by the number of Debian GNU/Linux | changes they make is like judging a branden@debian.org | legislature by the number of laws http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | it passes. -- Karl Fogel
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