Browsewrap Agreements
Mahesh T. Pai
paivakil at yahoo.co.in
Wed May 12 05:56:27 UTC 2004
Lawrence Rosen said on Tue, May 11, 2004 at 08:44:52PM -0800,:
> During a long and difficult discussion on this list a couple of
> years ago I argued that the open source community had to stop
> burying its head in the sand about obtaining "manifestations of
> assent" to its licenses. Lots of people, including some OSI board
> members, complained about that fact of law. This court in the
> second circuit has now gone beyond that, in a narrowly fact-based
> decision, to suggest that knowledge of the existence of a license
> and the repeated use of the licensed data, at least in a business
> context, may be enough to form a contract even where the
> formalities of assent are not complete. Some of us would like the
> courts to recognize that there are many such situations --
> including with lots of open source software -- where assent to the
> license terms is implied by repeated transactions even without
> click-wrap or formal approval of the license terms before the
> licensed content is accessed.
I think access to data and *use* of software are entirely
different. *distribution* is a third. *modification* is fourth. I'll
comment more after re-reading te decision.
> still wise for open source licensors to obtain explicit
> manifestations of assent to their licenses.
Even when the licensor grants permission unilaterally? Like the BSD or
GNU GPL?
--
"Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security
deserve neither security nor liberty"
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