Quoting Chris F Clark ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): me> Perhaps a clause of the OSD should read that "the license should not me> discriminate against (or prohibit) any form of usage which is not me> already proscribed by copyright law". That would be a very strong me> bound on what open source licenses can regulate.
Rick Moen replied: > A possibly silly question of my own: If a particular form of usage is > already proscribed by copyright law, then wouldn't it be pretty much > pointless for a licence to "discriminate against or prohibit" it? 1) By usage I ment something more general. In particular, I was thinking of the 5, 6, or so specific rights reserved to a copyright holder in US law. I was not aware that EU law also reserved the right of executing a progam to the copyright owner also, which is certainly a relevant and important consideration. My intent by proposing the clause was to make certain that a license acted only as a "grant" type license. 2) I think because a license might be used in locations other than the author's own, some authors might want to specifically restrict that right in their license, despite the fact that such a clause would be unnecessary in their home jurisdiction. For example, the GPL specifically restricts ones right of redistribution, in the US that restriction acts more as a grant, because in the US one cannot normally redistribute works that are not ones own. However, if we went to some other location, we might find a jurisdiction that did not make redistribution a priviledged right reserved to the author and the GPL would then act solely as a restriction, not a grant. I'm not sure I can clarify what I meant without making my idea US-law-centric. In particular, I think a license ought to grant the recipients right to "use" the work in the manner that such works are normally used. That is programs should grant the right to be run, documents should grant the right to be read, pictures whould grant the right to be viewed, recorded songs the right to be heard, printed songs the right to be sung, etc. -Chris -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
