Dual licensing

[Sam Barnett-Cormack]

> However like Marius I find the GPL and other open source licenses inadequate to
> express this, since most if not all allow certain situations to avoid
> reciprocation e.g. internal use, web services. I should think GPL and friends
> were never designed to be the "bad cop" part of a "good cop, bad cop"
> dual-licensing scheme to get priopetary users to pay.

Well, you're never going to be able to restrict internal use on a
license that allows redistribution, IMO. Take the example of a book...

You buy, or are given legally, a book. Now, copyright stops you from
doing most things with it, of course, including fanfic, strictly.
However, no-one can stop you, legally, from writing fanfic for your own
consumption, provided you don't 'distribute' it. What counts as
distributions is, of course, a good question. Leaving it lying around in
a private place (physically) and someone picking it up and flicking
through it probably isn't, nor, I reckon, would be sharing it with a
private group who are writing together. By the same token, you cannot be
stoped from colouring in certain words with highligher, or even blacking
tham out, or from taking the book apart and putting it together in a new
order. At that point, you're not breaking copyright law in the
slightest, those are things you can do to *your* book.[1]

Look at software the same. One *entity* (corporation, household,
whatever) has a legal copy, their's a lot of stuff they can do with it
that is fine by law as long as they don't pass it outside of that
entity. Of course, a click-wrap license is another matter entirely, but
a simple implicit license like the BSD license, or the GPL, could not do
it, except as a condition that's only enforceable if they *do* also do
something they would not otherwise have an right to.

IANAL

[1] I'm more certain about the colouring in/cutting up bit than the
fanfic bit, but still...

-- 

Sam Barnett-Cormack
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3