[License-review] Submitting CC0 for OSI approval

[Karl Fogel]

John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> writes:
>> By the awy, both MIT and BSD contain language strongly implying that
>> they are copyright notices and apply only to rights within that domain.
>
>What I said was that these two licenses contain the word "use", which is
>a patent rather than a copyright term of art.  So either "use" conveys no
>rights, or it conveys a patent license.

Are you sure about that?  If law worked like programming or predicate
logic, then sure :-).  But, for example, CC0 is clearly about copyright
only, yet it refers to "use" and "reuse" too (albeit in a way that's not
quite the same yet not quite different from that word in MIT and BSD).

A lawyer attempting to draft a broad permission grant might well include
the word "use" and yet still be referring only to copyright.  In fact, I
think that's quite likely to happen.

-Karl