begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Wed, May 02, 2007 at 12:15:11AM -0700: > Gabriel Sechan wrote: > > >No, they can't. *If* they own every copyright in there, they could > >decide to not make the next version of it GPL. They can't revoke the > >license on existing copies or versions.
Licenses *can* and *are* routinely revoked. Without "irrevocable" granting of rights in the license, the default will depend on what the law considers "normal"... which is probably NOT that licenses are implicitly irrevocable. > > And they can only do that > >much if they never accepted any user revision, removed/rewrote all > >user revisions, or were assigned copyright for all user revisions. Or declared that user revisions were "obviously derivative works" and therefore belonged to them *anyway*. > Folks, > > At best, it's murky. At worst, you're wrong. > > This stuff came up in the cphack case, but cphack was not under the GPL > so didn't get tested. > > In addition, that was only about distribution. Nobody talked about the > issue of usage. You *might* still be able to use the software, but you > will be unable to redistribute it further. I would think that you /would/ be able to use the software -- if I buy a book, the author cannot revoke the copyright and deprive me of my copy of the book -- but redistribution rights might well be revocable. In practice, however, I don't think that's likely. However, one never knows what a company with more lawyers than market share might choose to do. [snip] > http://old.lwn.net/2000/0330/ > > "The second challenge, though, is more disturbing. In the same article, > Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, indicated that he felt the GPL > could be challenged because no money changed hands. "'Nonexclusive > licenses given for free are generally revocable, even if they purport to > be irrevocable,' Volokh said. 'Even if the GPL license in cphack is > treated as signed and is covered by 205(e), it might still be revocable > by Mattel as the new owners of the cphack copyright.'" A line of argument sufficient to get laywers and court appearances involved, which is sufficient to invoke the DMCA and all that jazz. :( > This challenge would be based on the idea that, if no consideration > changes hands, then there is no contract between the author and the People tend to forget that contracts have three parts: an offer, an acceptance, and a consideration. (I think this -- the lack of a consideration -- is a weakness in the GPL, but adding in a consideration would be even *more* problematic, given the morass of copyrights.) > person using the software, just a free gift which is therefore revokable." I thought gifts couldn't be retracted. Once you've made a gift, you've given up your rights to control the gift. > The GPL *does not* explicitly prevent the revocation; the assignment of > copyright to the EFF *does* by way of the EFF charter. > > Just because you wish something to be true does not make it so. The issue is murky enough for laywers to scratch their heads and have honest and meaningful disagreements; the certainity of the armchair crowd is a bit disconcerting. -- IANAL. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
