Re: Honest does not pay here ...

Andrew McGregor
2003-01-12T10:17:38Z

I'm essentially paraphrasing an opinion I had access to at one time, from
one of the largest IP law specialist firms in our part of the world.

I'm not a lawyer myself, but that does convey accurately the sense of what
I was told. I suspect the US may be more 'much weaker' than 'slightly
weaker', given the context of the original.

And that's about all I can think of to say about this. Please don't think
I'm being evasive, it's just that I perhaps sounded surer that I should,
and I certainly omitted the IANAL. Also, the opinion I'm paraphrasing was
mostly not about software copyright, so this is about all it said that was
relevant.

One thing I do have in mind is to dig around in the headers etc. and see
what I can find as to (implicit or explicit) license declarations. That
may not be a priority, as I have no intention of writing non-GPL kernel
code myself anytime soon, I'm more curious and would like to see the issue
sorted out.

Andrew

--On Sunday, January 12, 2003 01:27:10 -0800 "Adam J. Richter"
<adam@yggdrasil.com> wrote:

> Paul Jakma writes:
>> And frankly, courts in most parts of the world will look at community
>> practice as a (slightly weaker than a court case) precedent [...]
>
> Since you imply that you are familiar with "courts in most
> parts of the world", I'd be interested if you could identify, and,
> ideally, quote the court decisions or laws that define this "community
> practice as a (slightly weaker than court case) precedent" doctrine,
> presumably some kind of extension of stare decisis that I haven't
> heard of before.
>
> Apparently, findlaw hasn't heard of it either. "community
> practice" only turned up one clearly inapplicable hit (in quotation
> marks so as not to turn up every page containing the words "community"
> and "practices") about "studies performed in community practice
> settings involving thousands of patients." In comparison,
> "contributory infringement" turned up 75 hits, 129 hits for "stare
> decisis", 246 hits for "court precedent." I don't see anything
> relevant from poking around google, but there were a lot of hits.
>
> Anyhow, as far as I can tell, no copyright owner other than
> Linus has given permission to use their code with proprietary modules.
> If you want to give people permission to use _your_ code under terms
> essentially identical to the LGPL (since you can always write wrapper
> functions) then feel free to state that you are granting that
> permission, or, perhaps more simply, LGPL your contributions.
>
> I'm not a lawyer. This is not intended as legal advice.
>
> Also, if you do not answer my question clearly and honestly or
> I otherwise think you've danced around it, then I may not be able to
> prioritize any more time to you respond further. That does not imply
> agreement.
>
> Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 575 Oroville Road
> adam@yggdrasil.com \ / Milpitas, California 95035
> +1 408 309-6081 | g g d r a s i l United States of America
> "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."
>
>