Get ready....

[Gabe Wachob]

Tim Pierce wrote:

>
> It would be interesting to find out whether the text of a license can
> itself be protected as intellectual property, or whether the license
> is by its nature public domain or otherwise free.
>

At least in the US, licenses aren't treated specially -- if they satisfy all of
the copyright preqrequisites (see The Copyright FAQ:
ftp://ftp.aimnet.com/pub/users/carroll/law/copyright/faq/)

In fact, many sorts of legal documents are created from "Form Books" which are
basically forms where you fill-in-the-blanks to get a conforming legal document.
Those forms, I am almost sure, are copyrighted themselves. (Check out
http://www.findlaw.com/16forms/index.html to see some examples -- many of these
are government filing forms -- those are rarely copyrighted, but the forms
produced by private entities are usually copyrighted)

    -Gabe