Bob Young writes a letter to Darl

Posted Dec 12, 2003 19:03 UTC (Fri) by jre (guest, #2807) [Link]

Sure.
And in his reply to Prof. Mickey Davis, RMS hit the nail on the head:

"The crucial point is that when we release a program under the GPL, we do not claim that all possessors of a copy have agreed to any contract with us."

You quoted Prof. Eben Moglen as stating the practical import of this at the beginning of your post, viz.:

"Because the GPL does not require any promises in return from licensees, it does not need contract enforcement in order to work." -- Eben Moglen

All you seem to be saying is that some concepts of contract law are implicit in copyright law, otherwise the whole thing would never work.

Well, duh.

Defendant John Doe in your example claims the right, because contract law has been explicitly excluded from consideration, to stop listening at any point he deems appropriate. So he read the GPL right up to and through the part about "you may copy and distribute" -- then he shut his eyes and refused to read another word. That way, when he is called to account for GPL violation he can say "Ha, ha, contract law doesn't apply, so you can't touch me."

That's silly. If contract law and copyright law could ever be divorced in the way you hypothesize, I could ask for permission to quote some part of an author's work, then as soon as he got past saying "Sure, you have permission ..." I could clap my hands over my ears and start whistling "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Then I would just reprint the whole thing and claim that contract law doesn't apply.

Whether you call it a "license" or a "unilateral contract" is a distinction without a difference. What is important is that, in this case, the recipient is under no reciprocal obligation except the responsibility to understand what permission is being given.