Messages in this thread | ![/](/images/icornerl.gif) | | Date | Sun, 12 Jan 2003 23:25:14 +1300 | From | Andrew McGregor <> | Subject | Re: Honest does not pay here ... |
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I'm essentially paraphrasing an opinion I had access to at one time, from one of the largest IP law specialist firms in our part of the world.
I'm not a lawyer myself, but that does convey accurately the sense of what I was told. I suspect the US may be more 'much weaker' than 'slightly weaker', given the context of the original.
And that's about all I can think of to say about this. Please don't think I'm being evasive, it's just that I perhaps sounded surer that I should, and I certainly omitted the IANAL. Also, the opinion I'm paraphrasing was mostly not about software copyright, so this is about all it said that was relevant.
One thing I do have in mind is to dig around in the headers etc. and see what I can find as to (implicit or explicit) license declarations. That may not be a priority, as I have no intention of writing non-GPL kernel code myself anytime soon, I'm more curious and would like to see the issue sorted out.
Andrew
--On Sunday, January 12, 2003 01:27:10 -0800 "Adam J. Richter" <adam@yggdrasil.com> wrote:
> Paul Jakma writes: >> And frankly, courts in most parts of the world will look at community >> practice as a (slightly weaker than a court case) precedent [...] > > Since you imply that you are familiar with "courts in most > parts of the world", I'd be interested if you could identify, and, > ideally, quote the court decisions or laws that define this "community > practice as a (slightly weaker than court case) precedent" doctrine, > presumably some kind of extension of stare decisis that I haven't > heard of before. > > Apparently, findlaw hasn't heard of it either. "community > practice" only turned up one clearly inapplicable hit (in quotation > marks so as not to turn up every page containing the words "community" > and "practices") about "studies performed in community practice > settings involving thousands of patients." In comparison, > "contributory infringement" turned up 75 hits, 129 hits for "stare > decisis", 246 hits for "court precedent." I don't see anything > relevant from poking around google, but there were a lot of hits. > > Anyhow, as far as I can tell, no copyright owner other than > Linus has given permission to use their code with proprietary modules. > If you want to give people permission to use _your_ code under terms > essentially identical to the LGPL (since you can always write wrapper > functions) then feel free to state that you are granting that > permission, or, perhaps more simply, LGPL your contributions. > > I'm not a lawyer. This is not intended as legal advice. > > Also, if you do not answer my question clearly and honestly or > I otherwise think you've danced around it, then I may not be able to > prioritize any more time to you respond further. That does not imply > agreement. > > Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 575 Oroville Road > adam@yggdrasil.com \ / Milpitas, California 95035 > +1 408 309-6081 | g g d r a s i l United States of America > "Free Software For The Rest Of Us." > >
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