Adam Kessel wrote: > On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 09:15:04PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: >> Perhaps you could explain the status of license and contract texts, since >> the case quoted below is of no help whatsoever. These are not, as far as >> I can tell, "the law" -- they are not laws or regulations -- and they are >> routinely copyrighted. However, the courts apparently never uphold >> claims of infrignement based on the use of essentially-identical >> (boilerplate) >> legal text in other contracts or licenses. (I think there was a case >> where the supplier of fill-in-the-blank forms sued for copyright >> infrignment and lost, but I can't look it up right now.) <snip>
> One case on point is _Donald v. Zack Meyer's TV_, 426 F.2d 1027 (5th Cir. * That * was the one I was thinking of. :-) Thanks. > 1970). Jessica Litman summarized the case nicely, so I'll just quote > her[2]: > > Mr. Donald dropped out of law school after a year and went into the > business of printing business invoices. He drafted and registered the > contract language that appeared on the bottom of these invoices, and > sued Moore's when, at the request of one of Donald's former customers, > it added Donald's language to the forms it printed. The district court > ruled that Moore's had infringed Donald's copyright. The 5th Circuit > reversed, finding Donald's copyrights invalid for want of originality. > In essence the court concluded that Donald *must* *have* copied the > language from legal form books available in the law library during the > year he was in law school. I wouldn't even try to defend the court's > rationale, but most courts would have reached the same result. > > The contractual language in _Donald v. Zack Meyer's TV_ was much closer > to boilerplate language than, e.g., the OSL 2.0 text. Without having > done much research on the question, I would expect that copyright > protection would be "thicker" for OSL 2.0 than for something like a > standard purchase and sale agreement. -- Make sure your vote will count. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
