3 ms·

Are you a lawyer or legally trained? Honestly interested to know because you're expounding on this with some degree of forcefulness, but you also seem to have s

Are you a lawyer or legally trained? Honestly interested to know because you're expounding on this with some degree of forcefulness, but you also seem to have some unusual understandings of legal terms as I would understand them. e.g. - viewing or caching a web page doesn't require the grant of intellectual property or proprietary right - that would be me assigning you the copyright or allowing you to sell it or something; - a printed document that uses a font is not a derivative work of the font because the typeface (vs. the code of the font itself) is not copyrightable; - "all rights reserved" refers to all rights of intellectual property ownership under the copyright, which absolutely are retained when licensing as opposed to assigning.

NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
Just on that last thing in particular: another example of a software license that has an 'all rights reserved' copyright statement and requires distribution of both the copyright statement and the license would be the BSD license. An example of another software license that explicitly separates copyright and licensing when describing itself would be the GPL, in either v2 or v3 form.
- wegs 6y ago
  The BSD license does NOT contain "All Rights Reserved." See: https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause That would contradict the license text.
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    The original 4-clause license does.
    - wegs 6y ago
      Fair enough. The original 4-clause license is also in the hall-of-fame of bad licenses. I believe you can also find bad legal code in a lot of the NC licenses, WTFPL, and the Hypocratic/ethical licenses in the same hall-of-fame. I wouldn't use any of those as examplars. If it makes you feel better, I found a link written by an actual JD: https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-term-all-rights-reserved-explained https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-term-all-rights-reser... Remind me of why we're still having this discussion. Unless you can post a link supporting your assertion, I think I've provided ample evidence at this point.
wegs 6y ago
I am not a lawyer, but I have taken law classes focused on business and IP law. I've also worked with a lot of lawyers around licensing issues. My understanding is that copyright ownership grants a specific set of exclusive rights: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work; (2) to prepare derivative works; (3) to distribute copies of the copyrighted work; (4) to perform the copyrighted work publicly; (5) to display the copyrighted work publicly; and (6) to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission. "All rights reserved" is (a now obsolete) notice which says exactly what it means: these rights remain with the owner. You get a physical copy of a book, and that's all. You have only the rights granted to you under fair use doctrine, first sale doctrine, etc. In contrast, a license is a grant of some of those rights to other parties. It doesn't assign away copyright ownership, but it does says that you may, for example, make a copy of my program under the terms defined in the license. It's worth referencing the difference between a license and a contract here, but that's a whole legal essay in itself, so I'll point to Moglen's writing here, as well as the discussion around the recent Artifex Software, Inc. v. Hancom, Inc. But yes, I was sloppy on the printed document example. I apologize. Take emailing my mom a PDF instead, which embeds a version of the font program rather than rendering the typeface. Thank you for pointing that out. I was intentionally giving examples which fell into a legal gray zone, though -- things which a judge would likely rule were okay, but which fell outside of the scope of the license as written. Those are the sorts of things which tend to blow up into expensive litigation. When drafting legal text, you want to leave nothing to being misinterpreted by a user or a judge, and you definitely don't want clauses which go against established law. If I'm a judge reading a contract or a license which has a clause which goes against the law, I can (1) restrict the scope of the clause to what's permissible under the law (2) toss out the clause, (3) toss out the whole license/contract, or (4) do something completely unpredictable. At the very least, if I have a contract or license which falls into a gray zone, I want a severability clause (and key clauses repeated with different scopes, some version clearly within the law, to make sure /something/ is left standing). Disclaimer: Nothing here constitutes legal advice.

NovemberWhiskey 6y ago

Just on that last thing in particular: another example of a software license that has an 'all rights reserved' copyright statement and requires distribution of both the copyright statement and the license would be the BSD license. An example of another software license that explicitly separates copyright and licensing when describing itself would be the GPL, in either v2 or v3 form.

wegs 6y ago
The BSD license does NOT contain "All Rights Reserved." See: https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause That would contradict the license text.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  The original 4-clause license does.
  - wegs 6y ago
    Fair enough. The original 4-clause license is also in the hall-of-fame of bad licenses. I believe you can also find bad legal code in a lot of the NC licenses, WTFPL, and the Hypocratic/ethical licenses in the same hall-of-fame. I wouldn't use any of those as examplars. If it makes you feel better, I found a link written by an actual JD: https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-term-all-rights-reserved-explained https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-term-all-rights-reser... Remind me of why we're still having this discussion. Unless you can post a link supporting your assertion, I think I've provided ample evidence at this point.

wegs 6y ago

I am not a lawyer, but I have taken law classes focused on business and IP law. I've also worked with a lot of lawyers around licensing issues. My understanding is that copyright ownership grants a specific set of exclusive rights: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work; (2) to prepare derivative works; (3) to distribute copies of the copyrighted work; (4) to perform the copyrighted work publicly; (5) to display the copyrighted work publicly; and (6) to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission. "All rights reserved" is (a now obsolete) notice which says exactly what it means: these rights remain with the owner. You get a physical copy of a book, and that's all. You have only the rights granted to you under fair use doctrine, first sale doctrine, etc. In contrast, a license is a grant of some of those rights to other parties. It doesn't assign away copyright ownership, but it does says that you may, for example, make a copy of my program under the terms defined in the license. It's worth referencing the difference between a license and a contract here, but that's a whole legal essay in itself, so I'll point to Moglen's writing here, as well as the discussion around the recent Artifex Software, Inc. v. Hancom, Inc. But yes, I was sloppy on the printed document example. I apologize. Take emailing my mom a PDF instead, which embeds a version of the font program rather than rendering the typeface. Thank you for pointing that out. I was intentionally giving examples which fell into a legal gray zone, though -- things which a judge would likely rule were okay, but which fell outside of the scope of the license as written. Those are the sorts of things which tend to blow up into expensive litigation. When drafting legal text, you want to leave nothing to being misinterpreted by a user or a judge, and you definitely don't want clauses which go against established law. If I'm a judge reading a contract or a license which has a clause which goes against the law, I can (1) restrict the scope of the clause to what's permissible under the law (2) toss out the clause, (3) toss out the whole license/contract, or (4) do something completely unpredictable. At the very least, if I have a contract or license which falls into a gray zone, I want a severability clause (and key clauses repeated with different scopes, some version clearly within the law, to make sure /something/ is left standing). Disclaimer: Nothing here constitutes legal advice.