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Re: More FSF hypocrisy


From: Rjack
Subject: Re: More FSF hypocrisy
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:23:10 -0400
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (Windows/20090302)

Alan Mackenzie wrote:

Through being a highly educated native English speaker.  I looked
it up in a dictionary, too. "Contract" (noun) means agreement (when it doesn't mean "get smaller", or the like). I suspect that the GPL isn't a contract in any USA jurisdiction, rather that it is for certain purposes subject to some of the same regulations.

I cited to the legal principle announced by the United Supreme Court
that is applied in U.S. jurisdictions concerning the formation of
intellectual property licenses:

"No formal granting of a license is necessary in order to give it
effect. Any language used by the owner of the patent or any conduct
on his part exhibited to another, from which that other
may properly infer that the owner consents. . ."; DE FOREST RADIO
TEL. CO. V. UNITED STATES, 273 U. S. 236 (1927).

This principle is applied uniformly by the U.S. courts to determine
whether an intellectual property license exists (often an implied
verbal contract). The GPL would be interpreted by the U.S. courts as
a contract.

You chose to summarily dismiss this asserted licensing principle thus:

"But I wasn't talking about the US courts' possible application of
Humpty Dumpty language."

OK. You win. . . end of discussion.

OK.  Here's you're paragraph again:

: Copyright licenses are designed to waive particular rights : to
exclude so that licensees may use those personam rights : granted by the copyright owner in contractual privity.

You might have meant this as a definitional criterion for a copyright license, asserting that the GPL, since it doesn't satisfy that criterion, isn't a copyright license at all. (The bit of the condition it doesn't satisfy is the "in contractual privity").

Alternatively, you might have been talking about why, historically, copyright licenses arose - that sometime after Gutenberg invented the press and copyright came into being, somebody spotted a problem, and the copyright license was designed as a solution to that problem.

I'm asking you which of these interpretations you meant when you wrote the paragraph, or if neither, what you did mean.

OK, what I meant was:

"Copyright licenses are designed to waive particular rights
to exclude so that licensees may use those in personam rights
granted by the copyright owner in contractual privity."

If your highly educated native English speaking skills fail in
helping you to understand this statement, I am not prepared to
continue parsing what the definition of "is" is.

So. . . end of discussion.

Sincerely,
Rjack :)


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