Bob Young writes a letter to Darl

Bob Young writes a letter to Darl

Posted Dec 12, 2003 7:10 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
In reply to: Bob Young writes a letter to Darl by danw6144
Parent article: Bob Young writes a letter to Darl

Your argument is extremely disingenous. Section 1 grants permission to copy and distribute verbatim copies of the work, provided that you include the copyright notice, etc. The defendant does not have to accept the license. If the defendant does not accept the license (and has not been otherwise granted some permission by the copyright owner), he or she has EXACTLY the rights granted by copyright law, which (in general) do not allow distribution of copies.

This is true even if the court chooses to ignore section 5 of the license.

If I don't accept the license for Microsoft Word, I'm not allowed to distribute copies of it. If I don't accept the license for GCC, I'm not allowed to distribute copies of it. By not accepting a software license, I gain no permissions beyond what is automatically granted by copyright law, and that is true whether the license is commercial or GPL.

If I want to distribute copies of a GPL'd work (either verbatim or derived), I have two choices:

1. Accept the license (GPL). The GPL provides a conditional grant of permission.
2. Negotiate some other license with the copyright owner. In this case the GPL is irrelevant.

You seem to be suggesting that the defendant could somehow construe section 1 of the GPL to be an UNCONDITIONAL grant of permission, but nothing in section 1 nor elsewhere in the GPL supports that idea.

Another example: I could write and give to my neighbor a license granting him the use of the swimming pool in my back yard on the condition that he not bring beer bottles into the yard. The neighbor doesn't have to accept this license. But if he chooses to accept it, then brings beer bottles into the yard, he's not going to be able to convince the court that I had granted him UNCONDITIONAL permission to use the pool, just because he doesn't like the condition imposed by the license. If he argues that he didn't accept the license, then he had no license to use the pool, and was trespassing.

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