[ILUG] Interesting article on free software licences

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Matthew French (mfrench42 at yahoo.co.uk):

> I think this may really be a question of jurisdiction - in other words,
> where the law applies.

Because of conventions necessitated by international trade, some things
are well nigh universal.  One is that contracts have to be bilateral
(offer and acceptance); copyright is a legal monopoly over a set of
rights, such that consequently grants of portions of those rights are
unilateral.

Now, I suppose a country could establish up a legal system where that
isn't the case, and where copyright monopolies are contracts (though I
don't see how), but then that country would have a really difficult time
doing business with the rest of the world.

Is the Code Napoleon that perverse?  Maybe, but I'll lay very long odds
against.

The more parsimonious explanation -- and the one we've seen over and
over, on the ISO's license-discuss mailing list -- is this is yet
another case of software lawyers who've never previously _seen_ a grant
of copyright that wasn't entangled in a contract (because their clients 
want more control over customers than is otherwise possible), and so
implicitly assume that such isn't possible.

> Certainly it looks like it would be a mistake under Irish, English or US
> laws. 

We saw the exact same error last year in a U. of Chicago Law School
paper, for what it's worth.

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