Shrink-wrap licensing

[John Cowan]

I read the SelectPhone case with great interest, especially
the following bit of dictum:

# Someone who found a copy of SelectPhone (trademark) on the street
# would not be affected by the shrinkwrap license--though the federal
# copyright laws of their own force would limit the finder's ability
# to copy or transmit the application program.

This suggests that when there is no relation of buying and selling
between the copyright holder and the end user, no shrink-wrap-style
license can alter the position between them.  As a result, the
open-source community would have to fall back on the conditional-copyright-
grant theory.

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan at ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin