Re: Against DRM 1.0
Scripsit Max Brown <max05001@yahoo.com>
> What about "Against DRM 1.0" (a license for art works)?
> http://www.freecreations.org/Against_DRM.html
It is horribly badly drafted. The central clause reads
| 6. No DRM
|
| This license is incompatible with any technology, device or
| component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed
| to prevent or restrict acts which are authorised or not authorised
| by licensor: this incompatibility causes the inapplicability of the
| license to the work.
Let's ignore the arguable ambiguity of which technologies and devices
are covered for a moment. Even so it is not clear which legal effect
an assertion that "[the] license is incompatible with it" has. The
part after the colon appears to state that simply because this stated
incompatibility exists, the license is inapplicable to the (any?)
work. One could try to interpret that loosely as saying that the
license cannot apply to works that are distributed on DRM media. But
what if the copyright owner says that the license applies? Or what if
the copyright owner says that the license applies, and afterwards
someone else makes a copy of the work on DRM media. Does the license
then cease to apply to the work in general? To all copies?
What the author of the license probably _meant_ to say is that the
license does not authorize the creation of copies on DRM media. But
the text he came up with fails horribly at saying that. I would argue
that Debian should reject works "licensed" under this text as
potential lawyerbombs.
(It also seems strange to explicitly exclude DRM when there is no
general copyleft mechanism in the license. It appears to be allowed to
incorporate the licensed contents in proprietary works, just as long
as the distribution of the proprietary work does not use DRM. Strange).
--
Henning Makholm "The man who catches a meniningococcus is in
considerably less danger for his life, even without
chemotherapy, than meningococci with the bad luck to catch a man."
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