creative commons
creative commons
Posted Jan 14, 2003 10:25 UTC (Tue) by jneves (guest, #2859)In reply to: creative commons by mmutz
Parent article: creative commons
I'm still not sure if a copyright license is a contract or not.
As for Theo de Radt's concerns, I can only say that the tradition of "Droit d'Auteur" shared by, at least, France, Germany and Portugal doesn't allow for waiving certain rights provided by the law in any kind of contract. I haven't read the creative commons licenses, but if they are an attempt, at least in part, to put works on public domain sooner than these countries laws would permit, then they are, probably ineffective in most European Union. IANAL.
Posted Jan 16, 2003 19:51 UTC (Thu)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (1 responses)
Let me clear it up. I am a contract lawyer. No license is a contract. A license is a one-way thing. But licenses are normally given as part of a contract. Under US contract law, I am not bound by the license I give you if I didn't get anything in return. They call that "lack of consideration." When we say "BSD License," we really mean the standard contract that includes the BSD license. Read it again. In return for the license to use the software, the author gets a waiver from the user of liability for the author's negligence. Under tort law, absent a contract, you are responsible for damage that your negligence causes. If you negligently write and distribute software that causes my computer to be destroyed, you have to pay for the damage. But if I use your program under the BSD license, which you gave me as part of the BSD contract, then I agreed that if your negligence destroys my computer, _I_ will pay for the damage. There's a variation on the BSD contract -- can't rememember if it's the original or not -- where the user also promises, in exchange for the license, to keep the author's name attached to the program.
Posted Jan 22, 2003 6:54 UTC (Wed)
by ghane (guest, #1805)
[Link]
> Let me clear it up. I am a contract lawyer. Which was so surprising, I read it three times to try locating the missing "not". ;-) --
>I'm still not sure if a copyright license is a contract or not.what is a license and a contract?
Some people may be confused by the fact that the individual user doesn't actually negotiate with and interact with the author and sign an individual contract. What we have here is called a public contract. The author makes an offer to anyone who should read it. The user reads the offer and implicitly accepts it. That's a contract.
giraffedata said:what is a license and a contract?
Sanjeev