At 12:33 PM 1/9/2008, Frederik Ramm wrote: >Hi, > > > Although the recent Artistic License case has taken a different view: > > http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com/2007/08/new-open-source- > > legal-decision-jacobsen.html > >Hm, being neither lawyer nor native speaker of English nor American >citizen I my get some things wrong here but the statement > >"The second point is very important because it deals with remedies. >Generally, the remedy for contract violations under US law is >damages, not "injunctive relief" (which means that the court order a >party to cease their violation)." > >prompts me to ask: > >Would that mean that if our license was a contract and somebody >violated it, he would have to pay us damages, which I (perhaps >naively) would interpret as "the amount of money we lost due to his >infringement", i.e. zero dollars?
Yes, if I understand it, your summary is spot on. That is the main motive behind "Free Software Foundation and some lawyers have taken the position that open source licenses are not contracts" - copyright violation = you stop them continuing the violation versus contract violation = you can get damages = 0. So the obvious inference for us is that "data copyright" is meaningless and in the US, if this decision is adopted by higher level courts and becomes a precedent, then a contract is meaningless too except to stop people with morals. I can see where you are going with this one ;-) Mike Stockholm _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
