[License-discuss] Does this look like an open source license?

[David Woolley]

On 25/01/15 07:47, Maxthon Chan wrote:
> This lead me to create two thing: a 3c-BSD equivalent in simple English,
> and a 3c-BSD equivalent in Chinese (under law of Mainland China).

This sounds like a recipe for licence proliferation.

Note you can only do this if you own all the copyrights.

Also, any more complex licence, like the GPL, will only be valid in one 
language.  There may be official translations, but they will normally 
say that the primary language version is definitive, if there is any 
conflict.

> The incident is that one project owner found his code used in an
> commercial product without attribution but the Chinese-speaking court
> says that the license is not enforceable if it is written in a language
> that the judge cannot understand, and that particular judge have only
> beginner level English.
>

I assume part of China's accession to the WTO was that they implement 
the basic principle that everything is copyright by default.  In which 
case, if the licence is considered unenforceable, there is no licence, 
and therefore no permission to make copies of the copyright work, so the 
distributor of the commercial product is in breach of the copyright. 
That might cause other problems, of course.

I would also have assume part of WTO was the choice of law principle.