On Sat, Aug 15, 1998 at 12:51:52PM +0100, Jules Bean wrote: > My step-father is a lawyer, in the UK, and he says that there is no > special exclusion for copyright on licenses - i.e. licenses can be > copyrighted, and that copyright is enforceable. I'll speak to him again > about it, but that was definitely the story last time I asked..
The Berne treaty states that it's up to each country whether copyright extends to legal documents. The U.S. copyright act doesn't list legal documents among the exclusions, so they would be copyrightable in the U.S. Manoj is just being provincial. :) BTW, has Debian deposited CDROMs with the Library of Congress? It's actually required by law (if you want to enforce your copyrights), and might be a way to meet the GPL/NPL requirements for code availability. non-free/ could also be distributed this way if the libraries are cooperative. The National Library of Australia has a soon-to-be-mandatory CDROM deposition program as well. I could walk a set over at lunch some time. It's a small country.
