Re: Patent clauses in licenses
* Andrew Suffield:
>> We now have a (lower) German court ruling that this isn't the case,
>> i.e. that the termination clause is effective and you can't just get
>> another copy of the same work. It's rather surprising because it
>> conflicts with our equivalent of the first-sale doctrine
>
> Yes, this is in conflict with basic notions of copyright in most of
> the world; I would hope that it gets overturned.
Unlikely, this ruling has hardly anything to do with the original
case. The only defense of the defendant was that as a German
distributor of some software, he isn't responsible for copyright
infringement of that software because the software is distributed from
another European country. Not surprisingly, the court didn't find
this very convincing, and it was apparently a bit bored and went on
with its surprising GPL interpretation.
> It can only lead to insanity unless the conflict is corrected
Our legal system is a bit different because it doesn't rely as heavily
on precedents as the U.S. one. As a result, the ruling won't have any
harmful effect.
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