[cc-community] Re: CC licenses and "moral rights"
Rob Myers
robmyers at mac.com
Fri Mar 25 06:16:16 EST 2005
This is a community discussion. Everyone on there?
On 24 Mar 2005, at 22:47, Peter Brink wrote:
> When two people agree upon something that agreement is a legally
> speaking a contract. No open source license is anything else but a
> contract.
American law disagrees with you:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851
"A license like the GPL, on the other hand, which is a true license by
intent, and which, if you remember the original definition, is a
permission to do what otherwise you could not legally do, fits the
definition of license precisely."
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
"Licenses are not contracts: the work's user is obliged to remain
within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised,
but because she doesn't have any right to act at all except as the
license permits."
Other jurisdictions may well differ.
> the fact that there is room for creativity when writing source code
> doesn't mean that such possibilities are used. Functions, procedures
> and methods run a real risk of not being copyrightable, simply because
> they do tend to contain expressions which are purely functional.
Code (program listings) is a form of writing, that is what makes it
copyrightable.
- Rob.
--
http://www.robmyers.org/art - All my art, Creative Commons Licensed.
http://www.robmyers.orgt/weblog - Free Culture and Generative Art blog.
More information about the cc-community
mailing list