On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Pádraic Brady <[email protected]>wrote:
> > 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. > > Sorry, but that is almost sheer nonsense. I say almost, because I think you > are just about touching on the legal issue of a contract (and we know how > horrible they can be at times). In my nation, at least, the legal binding of > any license or contract is determined by the judiciary. The case law > surrounding the concept is quite solid. Licenses are legally binding - there > is no doubt here. The form can matter, and licenses have evolved a great > deal to compensate for this. However many licenses already cover certain > assumptions which by and large have proved very solid and upholdable in many > regimes, including my own. > > The debate has shifted focus though from the original point. The argument > is not the validity of a license, but the fact that a license does exist and > is attached to a feed. It exists. To ignore it or remove it is, at best, > morally unsound and, at worst, criminal. > The Atom specification states that a consumer of content is entitled to ignore elements it does not understand. There is no requirement in the standard for consumers to understand licences. So, as a feed provider who knows what I'm doing, I cannot assume that everyone consuming my feed will read or understand any licenses I choose to add in. (Besides which, as a practical matter, of the actually legally vetted licenses that are on offer -- CC, basically -- there are none that let me reduce copying rights for consumers; they all only increase rights beyond those granted by legislatures, author moral rights, common law, and the Tooth Fairy.) But aside from all this, as a publisher, I would be annoyed if someone stripped out the license I put in my feed (which grants fully copy-ability of my content) because I _want_ the content of that particular feed to be freely copied and not munged (say, to snippet-sized lengths to avoid legal entanglements in particular contexts). By reducing the freedom to copy of my downstream consumers, you're hurting me, the publisher. So it's a bad idea anyway from the POV of at least some publishers, regardless of the debate above. > > Paddy > > > 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. >> > >
