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

Stephen Michael Kellat skellat at fastmail.net
Tue Feb 19 00:06:26 UTC 2013


On 02/18/2013 12:36 PM, Richard Fontana 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).
>
> 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).
>
> That said, on to the HBR cure: I had a conversation with Bradley Kuhn
> in which we very briefly discussed this issue, as Bradley was long
> under the impression that the GPL could not *possibly* support an
> argument that mere licensees have some standing to enforce the source
> code requirement (despite the fact, of which Bradley might not be
> aware, that over the years some legal academics have at last taken the
> question seriously, if skeptically, and some private practice lawyers
> [admittedly seeking to profit from the erstwhile open source boom, the
> SCO crisis, etc.] purported to take this qite seriously too).
>
> I noted the obvious point that copyleft-next and GPLv2/GPLv3 are not
> worded identically, so his comment was partially irrelevant. 
>
> Bradley mentioned some interesting work that Australian lawyer Brendan
> Scott had done attempting, AIUI, to use Australian consumer protection
> law to give a basis for GPL licensees to sue upstream distributors for
> failure to provide source code. It is not clear whether such efforts
> have been successful.
>
> - RF
>
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I am not a lawyer.  I will say that developing a license and
promulgating it becomes an academic exercise if the ways to enforce it
are minimal to non-existent.  There needs to be teeth to back up
something to make it work regardless of how strange our current
copyright legislation may be.

Stephen Michael Kellat




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