[License-discuss] Permissive but anti-patent license

[John Cowan]

John Funnell scripsit:

> I believe it should be possible to restrict usage via copyright
> license conditions just as it is possible to restrict almost anything.
> E.g. I could put a clause that says licensee must be vegetarian.
> Anyone eating meat would not have copyright license benefits and could
> be held for infringement. Of course this would not be true open source
> but the point is that the copyright license is a mechanism to impose
> restrictions outside of copyright law.

I think it very unlikely, however, that a judge would uphold such
irrelevant and unreasonable (not to say whimsical) license conditions in
what is basically a public license.  I have discussed this in previous
years under the name of the "moose [excrement]" license.  No matter what,
if your license mentions moose excrement, that clause will probably
be severed.

There is, however, the Chicken Dance License:
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/26/chicken_dance_open_source_license>.
For several reasons given in the article, it is not in fact open source.

-- 
Values of beeta will give rise to dom!          John Cowan
(5th/6th edition 'mv' said this if you tried    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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