Automatic GPL termination

[Donovan Hawkins]

On Mon, 3 Sep 2007, dlw wrote:

> I am amazed more people have not taken notice of this decision by the United 
> States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Dec. 2006: 
> http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=05-2237.01A

I must have missed the part in that case where the recordings were 
released under the GPL.

More importantly, I must have missed the automatic termination clause in 
Santa Rosa's contract (the contract that he no longer has a copy of even).

Santa Rosa requested to have the contract rescinded for material breach, 
which is a contract law remedy. Copyright law preempts that action, 
meaning he would have to claim a violation of copyright law if he wants to 
proceed. Suing for damages is the only remedy available to him under 
contract law; I believe he didn't choose that course of action because the 
statute was barred.


GPL has an explicit automatic termination clause. It has also been claimed 
that copyright law is the proper place to decide GPL cases, which would 
rather obviously avoid the issue of being preempted by copyright law. If 
you want to debate that claim, we already have another thread going that 
you can join.

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Donovan Hawkins, PhD                 "The study of physics will always be
Software Engineer                     safer than biology, for while the
hawkins at cephira.com                   hazards of physics drop off as 1/r^2,
http://www.cephira.com                biological ones grow exponentially."
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