[License-discuss] Shortest copyleft licence

[Lawrence Rosen]

Maxthon Chan wrote:
> I still remembered my days reading through 17 USC and Chinese copyright law just to grasp an idea on how copyright works, and before I filed my patents I bought a book on how patent laws work. I have to educate myself in those legal concepts just to protect my own work.


As a lawyer and the author of such a book I'll tell you a secret: You really don't have to read all that stuff in order to protect your own work. Your own work is protected automatically except for things you copy from others or for inventions that others patented first. In almost all other respects, your own work is yours to do with as you please even without registering your copyrights or filing for patents.

Nor is such detailed reading necessary if you merely want others to use your works. As Nigel Tzeng and several others here pointed out, CC-BY-SA or one of the standard FOSS licenses will probably work for you without studying law. 

Engineers should become familiar at least with open source concepts if you want to copy the works of others. You should also pray that you're not sued for software patent infringement, and for most software programmers that's probably not much of an issue recently in many jurisdictions. :-)  

As a self-employed lawyer, I'm glad that not every programmer has the need to become a lawyer also.

/Larry

Lawrence Rosen
"If this were legal advice it would have been accompanied by a bill."
Rosenlaw & Einschlag (www.rosenlaw.com) 


-----Original Message-----
From: Maxthon Chan [mailto:xcvista at me.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 11:00 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Shortest copyleft licence

I have a gut feeling that this thread have somewhat common point as my “simple English BSD equivalent” thread as there are just too many politics and complexities involved in those licenses and engineers, being not-so-professional in law, gets confused easily.

I still remembered my days reading through 17 USC and Chinese copyright law just to grasp an idea on how copyright works, and before I filed my patents I bought a book on how patent laws work. I have to educate myself in those legal concepts just to protect my own work.

> On Apr 1, 2015, at 01:54, Tzeng, Nigel H. <Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 3/30/15, 10:00 PM, "Rick Moen" <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> It's an object lesson in why coders should not attempt to draft what 
>> are often on this mailing list termed 'crayon licences'.
>> 
>> A broader point:  The quest for the shortest possible licence (of 
>> whatever category) strikes me as solving the wrong problem.  If your 
>> problem is that you're dealing with people having difficulty 
>> contending with the reality of a worldwide copyright regime and 
>> trying to wish it out of their lives, maybe overcoming that lack of 
>> reality orientation ought to be your task.  (My opinion, yours for a 
>> small fee and waiver of reverse-engineering rights.)
> 
> Or perhaps they simply wish software licenses were as easy to 
> understand and use as the creative commons ones.
> 
> It should be as easy as SC-BY-SA 1.0 with a clear english (or 
> whatever) description without some debatable political/social agenda 
> behind it all like with the FSF/GPL.
> 
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