Re: GPLv3 comedy unfolding

[Alexander Terekhov]

Episode 


           Eben v. Congress (and half a dozen law professors)


"[Section: No more reliance on "derivative works"]

I will say, therefore, the second discussion draft of GPL3 will not 
have any longer any dependency on the American copyright law idea of 
a "derivative work". Accordingly we will be able to avoid another 
fifteen years of complaining from lawyers who quite justifibly 
thought that reliance on a US centric view of the derivative work 
was a major source of uncertainty and uneasiness. They may think 
that what we have done instead is not a perfect improvement, but I
feel certain that they will at least be the recognition that it's a 
useful development.

[...]

(Q&A)

[...]

Q3: I have another question concerning the DRM clause. There is one 
wording that says that covered software cannot be an effective measure 
against... er in the sense of the DCMA. Do you expect this clause to 
be effective?

   I expect that US courts will be instructed on the intention of the 
   licensor to reject the features of DMCA as it applies to GPL 
   software. I expect the United States courts to listen closely to 
   statements of the licensor's intent, because under US copyright 
   law it is the licensor's intent which normatively determines the 
   content of licene.

[...] 

Q7: How are you thinking about changing something in the title of the 
section, I think it's 9, "not a contract", because that that's a bit 
incompatible with the laws in some place, like in Brazil - I'm from 
Brazil.

I firmly disagree with that position, but nonetheless we will do 
something to meet these needs. I ultimately regard these believes as 
narrow-minded and foolish, it belongs to half a dozen law professors 
around the world, each of whom should check his cards again, and it's 
all "he". They are people with gray hair and old minds. They're not 
very old minds, because if in each of their legal systems they went 
to their old legal dictionaries and looked at what the word license 
means, or if they got real Roman about it and went and looked in the 
Institutes of Justinian to find out what license means, they would 
discover that a license is a unilateral permission, not an 
obligation, and so what happens is that these minds that say these 
thing, they're stuck in a little space, a thousand years after 
Justinian and before the Second World War."

What a clown.

http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/barcelona-moglen-transcript.en.html

regards,
alexander.