Automatic GPL termination

[Philippe Verdy]

Alexander Terekhov [mailto:alexander.terekhov at gmail.com] wrote:
> One just can't be a party to a contract that
> isn't even drafted yet.

Untrue. The licence is published, immutable, and publicly verifiable (unlike
almost all contracts that are privately written). Because the contract is
public, it can't be negociated between parties (it can only be accepted as a
whole or rejected as a whole). For this reason the GPLpreexists as a written
contract between the author and the public (this including every other
user). It has already been accepted as valid by a very large number of users
(and authors using it), much enough to prove that the contract is valid,
because millions of people could assert that it exists in its current form.

A GPL contract whose content is not public would be non-sense, because
nobody could verify its content and what has been granted or restricted.
And as long as you are not exposed to the content subject to the licence,
you are not exposed to the licence itself, so that fact that it applies to
you too does not matter. Note that GPL-covered works cannot come without a
copy of the licence, so if you are exposed to the content, you are exposed
to the licence too which is equally accessible, meaning that you can't
ignore its existence and the fact that you are already part of it as soon as
you accept to use the covered work: this is not an implicit signature,
because the simple fact of accepting to use the covered work means that you
have seen the licence and the conditions associated to the work.

As the FSF says, you are not obligated to accept the licence. But if you
refuse, you are not allowed to use or convey the covered work, due to the
exclusive copyright protecting the covered work from the original authors,
because only the authors or the licence can grant you these rights. The
default option is prohibition of use without prior acceptation of the
agreement, thanks to the legal copyright protection.