4 ms·

"I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing." In the same way that it's trivial to write a twitter cl

by roel_v 6y ago

"I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing." In the same way that it's trivial to write a twitter clone in a weekend, yes. Hundreds of goverments have tried for decades to do what you claim is trivial. Good luck.

nmfisher 6y ago
Extending restrictions to affiliates/related bodies corporate is absolute bread and butter commercial legal work. Most lawyers are writing these kind of clauses week in, week out. What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Writing clauses in a license is one thing, I suspect enforcing them through ultra complex international corporate structures is quite another. Edit: Sadly, I think these kinds of battles are rather one sided.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    Of course, licence clauses won't physically stop someone who is fine with wilful infringement. But they're not intended to. They're intended to restrict the behaviour of people who, by and large, respect the law. It's practically unthinkable that a company like Apple/Amazon/etc is going to create an expensive, complicated international legal structure to conceal wilful infringement of some open source licence. It's perfectly achievable to write a licence that forbids use or incorporation in products, servers or services from particular companies.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      It’s achievable. You could even just name the companies with a periodic process to update the list. There are all kinds of ways you can write a license that won’t be used popularly but would achieve this specific goal. Do you want to close “your” software off to companies who might seek to be acquired later?
- roel_v 6y ago
  While I have never practised as a lawyer, I do have a law degree, and I've written several papers on IP and IP licensing when I was in law school. And I will also add that I did not do my degree in the US. Still, I am quite convinced that it is very hard to codify the intention of what the OP wants to do in a generic software license (i.e. one that you do not draft specifically for each client). I do not have the motivation to lay out my full argument as that would take another entire paper, but even if it turns out to be not as hard as I think it is, it certainly isn't as easy as is posited here.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    I don’t know why you think it’s not possible (or that it’s anything more than trivial). Revenue, affiliated companies, third party service providers, etc are all basic legal concepts. The risk is far more likely to be inadvertently making the licence overly narrow and preventing usage by companies that you would actually intend to allow (or at least contemplate should be allowed). Regardless, the text doesn’t really matter. Most companies will run for the hills as soon as they see anything remotely like the contemplated licence. It’s just not worth the risk for them. Source: former lawyer.
    - roel_v 6y ago
      shrug The Unreal engine mentioned elsewhere in this threat also seems very simple (an order of magnitude more straightforward as what we're talking about here I'd argue), yet if you go on the Id forums you'll find many questions from people in various edge cases that fall under one category in spirit and another in the letter of the license. But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet, what do I know, we'll just have to agree to disagree until someone really tries to find out.
krageon 6y ago
Governments don't try very hard. It's in their best interest that this fraud-adjacent activity keeps going on, or at least that's the only reasonable explanation for why they keep cooperating so well with it.

by roel_v 6y ago

nmfisher 6y ago

Extending restrictions to affiliates/related bodies corporate is absolute bread and butter commercial legal work. Most lawyers are writing these kind of clauses week in, week out. What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.

arethuza 6y ago
Writing clauses in a license is one thing, I suspect enforcing them through ultra complex international corporate structures is quite another. Edit: Sadly, I think these kinds of battles are rather one sided.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Of course, licence clauses won't physically stop someone who is fine with wilful infringement. But they're not intended to. They're intended to restrict the behaviour of people who, by and large, respect the law. It's practically unthinkable that a company like Apple/Amazon/etc is going to create an expensive, complicated international legal structure to conceal wilful infringement of some open source licence. It's perfectly achievable to write a licence that forbids use or incorporation in products, servers or services from particular companies.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    It’s achievable. You could even just name the companies with a periodic process to update the list. There are all kinds of ways you can write a license that won’t be used popularly but would achieve this specific goal. Do you want to close “your” software off to companies who might seek to be acquired later?
roel_v 6y ago
While I have never practised as a lawyer, I do have a law degree, and I've written several papers on IP and IP licensing when I was in law school. And I will also add that I did not do my degree in the US. Still, I am quite convinced that it is very hard to codify the intention of what the OP wants to do in a generic software license (i.e. one that you do not draft specifically for each client). I do not have the motivation to lay out my full argument as that would take another entire paper, but even if it turns out to be not as hard as I think it is, it certainly isn't as easy as is posited here.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  I don’t know why you think it’s not possible (or that it’s anything more than trivial). Revenue, affiliated companies, third party service providers, etc are all basic legal concepts. The risk is far more likely to be inadvertently making the licence overly narrow and preventing usage by companies that you would actually intend to allow (or at least contemplate should be allowed). Regardless, the text doesn’t really matter. Most companies will run for the hills as soon as they see anything remotely like the contemplated licence. It’s just not worth the risk for them. Source: former lawyer.
  - roel_v 6y ago
    shrug The Unreal engine mentioned elsewhere in this threat also seems very simple (an order of magnitude more straightforward as what we're talking about here I'd argue), yet if you go on the Id forums you'll find many questions from people in various edge cases that fall under one category in spirit and another in the letter of the license. But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet, what do I know, we'll just have to agree to disagree until someone really tries to find out.

krageon 6y ago

Governments don't try very hard. It's in their best interest that this fraud-adjacent activity keeps going on, or at least that's the only reasonable explanation for why they keep cooperating so well with it.