<html><head/><body><html><head></head><body>Ben,<br>
<br>
Yes, my testimony was to establish the economic interest in attribution of Open Source software. However, it's going too far to say that the license terms were not a problem. The judge's finding starting at "Plaintiff's Claim Sounds in Contract, Not Copyright" is that the Artistic License 1.0 text is self-invalidating. It's not so clear that a better drafted license would have reduced us to basing the appeal on the economic value of attribution alone.<br>
<br>
Thanks<br>
<br>
Bruce<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">Ben Tilly <btilly@gmail.com> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap:break-word; font-family: sans-serif; margin-top: 0px">I do not believe that you are fairly describing the cause of what<br />happened. At issue was not the drafting of the license, it was the<br />fact that it was the first time that the legal idea of "follow the<br />license or we sue for copyright" had ever been tested in a US court<br />for software that had been given away to the world on generous terms.<br /><br />The judge's ruling was based on the fact that software was given away,<br />for free, with no expectation of a reward. Therefore there was no<br />loss in its being appropriated by a third party. The fact that the<br />software was available to everyone on generous terms meant that there<br />was no cause under copyright law. The judge ruled that the license<br />could be viewed as a contract, but of course the basic elements of a<br />valid contract were missing and so you couldn't sue under that either.<br /><b
r />If
the hobbyist had used the GPL as a license, the same facts would<br />have existed, and the judge could easily have ruled the same way. In<br />fact the reason why the case was so important is exactly because the<br />precedent undermined the enforceability of all open source licenses<br />where no contract existed.<br /><br />For verification, the judge's ruling and reasoning are available at<br /><a href="http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/docket/158.pdf">http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/docket/158.pdf</a>.<br /><br />On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com> wrote:<br /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">The license isn't really "standing up" when you have to file a writ of<br />certiorari after a judge throws his hands up at the license text and<br />pronounces it to be tantamount to a dedication to the public domain. That<br />was no easy appeal to win, and the Open S
ource
developer was seriously<br />damaged by the cost and the 5-year process. It cost me a good deal of time<br />and work too.<br /><br />A license that stands up would, I hope, require much less time to dispute<br />and would be parsed as intended by the court.<br /><br />So, what the Artistic License 1.0 made much more difficult for the poor Open<br />Source developer is exactly what I'd like to fix. And yet the Artistic 1.0<br />is not the one I thought of first upon seeing this discussion in progress.<br />We have much worse.<br /><br />Thanks<br /><br />Bruce<br /><br /><br />John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:<br /><br /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #ad7fa8; padding-left: 1ex;">Bruce Perens scripsit:<br /><br /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #8ae234; padding-left: 1ex;">1. They are ambiguous or likely to perform in court in unexpected<br />ways,
should
they ever be litigated. And thus they are harmful to<br />their users. De-listing is a prompt to the organization that<br />originally created the license to replace it with an accepted<br />license or to submit a new version with greater legal competence in<br />its construction. These would be the "crayon" licenses, mostly,<br />those written without legal counsel.</blockquote><br /><br />And yet the Artistic License 1.0, which is riddled with ambiguities and<br />a prototypical crayon license, is one of the few that has been tested<br />in court -- and stood up.</blockquote><br /><br />--<br />Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.<br /><br /><hr /><br />License-discuss mailing list<br />License-discuss@opensource.org<br /><a href="http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss">http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss</a></blockquote><br /><hr /><br />License-discuss mailing list<br
/>License-discuss@opensource.org<br /><a href="http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss">http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss</a><br /></pre></blockquote></div><br>
-- <br>
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.</body></html></body></html>