The GPL Is a License, not a Contract [LWN.net]

The GPL Is a License, not a Contract

Posted Dec 4, 2003 9:38 UTC (Thu) by sasha (subscriber, #16070)
In reply to: The GPL Is a License, not a Contract by bbencic
Parent article: The GPL Is a License, not a Contract

I do not know about West-European lows, but I can speak about Russia.
Some lowers thinks that GPL is enforcable in Russia, and some lowers think in other way. There are 2 problems:

1. GPL can't be translated to Russian. Well, there are some translations, but they have no legal force, as it is written in the GPL. Russian low is very complex in this point, and there are circumstances when license in foreign language can't be forced.

2. Russian lows are not USA lows. GPL is constructed to work with USA lows, with their concepts and so on. The usual thing -- many USA people thinks that USA is the only country in the world. As a result, it does not work.

There are some known violates of GPL in Russia. Nobody tries to do anything with this.

The only good thing is that MS EULA does not comply to Russian low as well as GPL. And there exist some court decisions about MS EULA. Of course, most people does not know about all that things.

I think, it is good time to re-write GPL and make it work in many contries.

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The GPL Is a License, not a Contract

Posted Dec 4, 2003 9:59 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Actually, one of the main goals of the GPL was to have it work in every country. That's why it doesn't contain any references to US law, or US precedent.

I haven't heard anyone suggest that it's not enforceable in the EU. (except for two legal studys that were funded by Microsoft.)

GPL and foreign laws

Posted Dec 4, 2003 16:05 UTC (Thu) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

Hmmm. I'm not a lawyer, but I can see several potential issues here.

The GPL is a license under copyright law. Because of various treaties, copyright law tends to be fairly similar in most countries.

The GPL is a unilateral permission--it simply allows you to do something you would not normally be allowed to do. Therefore, if the GPL is invalid in a given country, it's probably technically illegal to distribute GPL'd software at all. In this way, the GPL is a lot stronger than Microsoft's EULA in many jurisdictions.

It's also possible that a country might have different laws about how invalid licenses are handled, or what consitutes an implicit contract. So it's not clear-cut.

Now, it's not worth any US author's time to sue in Russian courts anyway. Maybe in Europe (or possibly Japan).

Anyway, this is just my random thoughts. Hire a lawyer if you need legal advice.

The GPL Is a License, not a Contract - Russian law

Posted Dec 4, 2003 18:02 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

First off I'm not a lawyer and I don't know anything about Russian law.
Having said that...

Actually the GPL was designed to work in many countries. I assume
Russia signed the Berne convention. If so, it should be enforcable
because copyrights are recognized without registration and cover
distribution and creation of derivative works.

So even if item 1 is a problem which makes the GPL invalid, 2 is not
a problem (from an enforcability standpoint) because people would have
no rights to distribute or create derivative works. And if they don't
do those things there isn't a compliance problem in the first place.