Sean Kellogg wrote: > Even in the civil law societies > (most of continental Europe and Japan) the law has been adopted from the > United States post World War II, especially in the area of contract law where > global economies have force a homogenization of the law.
In my experience this homogenization is mostly in the contracts themselves, not in the underlying laws. We recently had a discussion over the whole "consideration" thing (or lack thereof) that is needed under common law, but not in civil law countries. > It does raise an interesting question though. If Debian strives to be > "legal" > in every corner of the globe regardless of the laws there, how do we approach > countries where copyright law prohibits the sharing of software? Such a Thankfully, copyright law is much more harmonized than contract law. You have more or less the same rights as an author in every country in the world. So it's certainly possible to draft a license that grants comparable permissions in every jurisdiction. I'm not aware of any law that forbids the author to grant world-wide, royalty-free licenses to any user/distributor of the software. There are some things that are different between jurisdiction, such as the European concept of moral rights that an author cannot give up, or the definition of "derivative work". But what I've seen in software disputes is that judges tend to consider verdicts from other countries, since they feel it is important to harmonize with these other countries (and probably also because that means they have to study fewer technical details). Arnoud -- Arnoud Engelfriet, Dutch patent attorney - Speaking only for myself Patents, copyright and IPR explained for techies: http://www.iusmentis.com/
