[copyleft-next] HBR cure 2013-02-18

Pamela Chestek pchestek at gmail.com
Mon Feb 18 18:21:16 UTC 2013


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 12:36 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> This is a HBR cure.
>
> First, for those of you not following the official draft closely, as
> of a recent commit, I have audaciously and iconoclastically added this
> sentence to the (now single) section on object code disribution:
>
>   Each recipient of the Covered Work from You is an intended
>   third-party beneficiary of this License solely as to this section []
>   with the right to enforce its terms.
>
> If any of the lawyers on this list have any comments of a strictly
> insider-professional-knowledge *legal* nature on this sentence,
> including arguments for its deletion or modification, feel free to
> speak up (in a HBR-compliant manner of course).

I believe it is effective for the task. Problems with trying to claim
the benefit of a contract when one is a third party are generally
because the contract doesn't expressly state that there is a
third-party beneficiary and it is very difficult to win the argument
in the absence of the express provision.  So my inclination is that
this works fine although I didn't look anything up so I could be
completely wrong.

>
> If anyone (non-lawyer or otherwise) thinks it would be bad *policy* to
> live in a world where a GPL-like license could be enforced through the
> legal system by the obvious immediate beneficiaries of the source code
> requirement, feel free to speak up (in a HBR-compliant manner of
> course).
>
This is, in theory, a significant poison pill to the use of the
agreement, so it's a policy decision. That said, I suspect that anyone
who isn't sophisticated about copyleft (which is most everyone)
believes that this is already a feature of the GPL licenses. In other
words, the great fear of GPL is that it will "infect" your proprietary
code and you will be forced to release the source code.  (Correct me
if I've misunderstood; I think this provision will have that effect.)
So I'm not sure that adding the actual mechanism for it to work will
make the license less palatable to a commercial user of copylefted
code than the GPL already is, although it should.

Pam


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