Automatic GPL termination

[dlw]

"I firmly disagree with that position, but nonetheless we will do 
something to meet these needs. I ultimately regard these believes as 
narrow-minded and foolish, it belongs to half a dozen law professors 
around the world, each of whom should check his cards again, and it's 
all "he". They are people with gray hair and old minds. They're not very 
old minds, because if in each of their legal systems they went to their 
old legal dictionaries and looked at what the word licence means, or if 
they got real Roman about it and went and looked in the Institutes of 
Justinian to find out what licence means, they would discover that a 
licence is a unilateral permission, not an obligation, and so what 
happens is that these minds that say these thing, they're stuck in a 
little space, a thousand years after Justinian and before the Second 
World War." -- Eben Moglen
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/barcelona-moglen-transcript.en.html


Eben Moglen's Phd is in History. In the above quote he is saying 
disregard all contemporary laws, statutes and present day court 
precedents. Go back and let the legal principles of the Byzantine Empire 
of 500 AD guide your crafting of copyright license. How can present day 
Free Software believers wallow in the tripe that Moglen spews? His goal 
is the destruction of
"intellectual property" in commerce.

All free software licenses that contain schemes to control evolving 
(downstream) derivative works -- "to keep the code open" -- are 
preempted under US copyright law. Why don't those that believe in open 
source just use Academic Free or BSD style licenses and forget the silly 
socialist schemes? If coders don't want the proprietary world to "steal 
their code" then publish it with a scope restriction "no commercial use" 
-- that restriction is easily enforceable under copyright law.