GPL and foreign laws

GPL and foreign laws

Posted Dec 4, 2003 16:05 UTC (Thu) by emk (subscriber, #1128)
In reply to: The GPL Is a License, not a Contract by sasha
Parent article: The GPL Is a License, not a Contract

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.

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