On 25 Jan 2006 20:48:29 -0500, Michael Poole <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Raul Miller writes: > > If Adobe is going to take legal action against someone else, > > they'll have to deal with the jurisdiction(s) where this someone > > else has a presence. > > Why do you say that?
You pretty much answered your question: > Other countries have quite different rules for venue and jurisdiction. > Unlike copyright, there are few international treaties on the subject. ... > Question 12's subequestions h and p at [1] are particularly relevant. > > [1]- http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html This isn't a "you must". No one is requiring that you sue Adobe, and suing Adobe isn't a normal part of anyone's use or development cycle. Nor is there anything significant here for Adobe to sue you about. > Adobe has attempted (with some success) to use copyright law -- > especially the criminal portions of the DMCA -- to harass and hamper > those who take advantage of weak copy protections in Adobe software. DMCA is not relevant here. > If Adobe's software had been open source, they would have even more > basis for pursuing such claims, since Adobe could (perhaps reasonably) > allege that prospective defendants had exercised license-controlled > copy rights relating to Adobe's software, and that those actions > subject the defendant to Adobe's preferred venue. We're talking about technological measures which enforce license provisions. If the license says anyone can freely own, modify and redistribute a copy of the software, what problem do we have with technology which enforces those license provisions? If there was some technological measures which conflicted with the copyright that would be a different story -- and it still wouldn't be a DMCA issue. > > Choice of venue, to me, means "we're giving this away, and > > we don't want to have to pay big legal fees because of that." > > If a licensor want to avoid that, they should instead specify that > suits naming the author(s) or licensor(s) as defendants must be filed > in that venue, rather than specifying that all suits pertaining to the > software must be filed in the venue. As it happens, it says that all suits pertaining to the license must be filed in the venue. Legal actions about the software which don't have anything do do with the license (perhaps: "that adobe stole the software from SCO") aren't constrained by this clause. > > No one has ever demonstrated any mechanism where choice > > of venue could prevent porting, security patches, enhancements > > or other such things. At least, not that I'm aware of. > > I suspect that, to precisely the same extent, no one has ever > demonstrated mechanisms where sending a postcard, petting a cat, > identifying yourself or publishing modifications to third parties > could prevent those things, either. You seem to be referring to clauses that restricted modification (with the exception of "petting the cat", which I've never seen in any license). The choice of venue clause we are talking about here does not restrict modification. If there's some relevant problem here (something which is specific enough to be distinguished from FUD), we're not talking about it yet. -- Raul