On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Jay Rossiter <[email protected]> wrote: > Licenses are binding legal documents, they are > not legislatively provided copyright protections.
What is and is not a binding legal document and what is the proper form or scope of a legally binding document is defined by legislatures. Neither standards groups nor individuals can define what is legally binding -- they aren't legislatures. Imagine if this wasn't the case... Then, I could insert "license restrictions" in any content I created and do it in some totally random way that you'd never heard of. Then, on discovering that you hadn't done what I said, I could sue you and claim that you should have studied the bits before you did anything with them. You might argue that I hadn't tagged my "license" in some "standard" way, but I would just argue that I have as much standing as any Standards group as far as the law is concerned. The only way that I can force you to take notice of my particular way of encoding license terms is if I use a format defined by a legislature. If anyone could randomly declare limitations on the use of their content then we'd have to simply shut down the Internet since you'd never know what rights you had until you'd already touched some data and potentially had already violated the terms! The Internet would be too dangerous to use if the law allowed people to create such licenses. This limitation of the scope of unilateral declarations of license terms is, of course, explicitly noticed in all the Creative Commons licenses -- that are normally what people are concerned with. All of these licenses contain explicit statements that they do not restrict rights otherwise granted by copyright. For instance, they all say: "ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE *OR COPYRIGHT LAW* IS PROHIBITED." That means that the Creative Commons license prohibits nothing that is otherwise permitted under copyright law. The CC licenses also include the following: "If the standard suite of rights granted under applicable copyright law includes additional rights not granted under this License, such additional rights are deemed to be included in the License; this License is not intended to restrict the license of any rights under applicable law." So, at least twice in each Creative Commons license you will find a statement that CC licenses do not restrict any rights otherwise granted under copyright... Legislatures define the form and scope of legally binding licenses. You can write whatever you want, but it is only legally binding if some legislature said it would be. bob wyman On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Jay Rossiter <[email protected]> wrote: > On 12/28/2009 1:19 PM, Bob Wyman wrote: > > When you put "license" text content, you can be as explicit as you > > want to be. However, that doesn't mean that anything you claim, write, > > etc. has any legal weight. What has weight is what the legislature > > says has weight and there is no legislature that has ever defined any > > format or protocol for specifying license rights in digital content. > > Because this is an issue of the law, not technology, no "standard" > > defined by any non-legislative body can serve to define such formats. > > Only legislatures, or other law makers (Kings, dictators, rulers, > > etc.), define the law. Standards are not laws and have no legal weight > > unless explicitly incorporated into the law. > > I'm sorry - that's just a silly statement. Copyright and licenses > are two different things. If what you say were true, then no EULA or > software license (e.g. GPL) would be legal. > > Those licenses define how and where and under what circumstances the > things that it covers can be used. They can require that attribution > always be maintained, and even that the license itself is always > included (GPL and most other software licenses), they can require almost > anything within reason, really. > > Licenses are binding legal documents, they are not legislatively > provided copyright protections. >
