(OT) - Major Blow to Copyleft Theory

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mahesh T. Pai (paivakil at yahoo.co.in):

> Alexander Terekhov said on Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 03:36:09PM +0200,:
> 
>  > The first point is important because the Free Software Foundation
>  > and some lawyers have taken the position that open source licenses
>  > are not contracts. They have good reasons for wishing to avoid some
>  > contract formalities, but this position has complicated discussions
>  > about the enforceability and remedies for open source licenses.
> 
> As I understand the FSF, they are clear in saying that the GPL is not
> a contract. I am not sure what I am missing, but where does FSF say
> that ``all open source licenses are not contracts''?

Quite.

Further, I didn't see Alexander Terkehov's posting, but gather that it
concerns the California JMRI case.  Based on the above quotation,
Terekhov has fundamentally misrepresented the case -- relying in part on
selective quotation from Mark Radcliffe's blog.  LWN subscriber "bojan"
seems to have the best critique:

http://lwn.net/Articles/246791/

In any event, Radcliffe cites cogent reasons why Judge White's decision
is simply wrong -- as, indeed, it should be obvious that stripping the
copyright holders' names / copyright notices from a creative work is a
straightforward violation of the Copyright Act, anywhere in the USA,
irrespective of contract concerns.