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ivraatiems 5y ago

With regards to US law, and again, IANAL, so if an attorney chimes in I'd defer to them: "License" is a very general concept. You can give somebody "license" to do almost anything. See e. g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/license https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/license "Copyright" is a specific thing that you can possess - see the definition here: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/definitions.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/definitions.html You can therefore grant somebody license to use something over which you hold copyright. You can also grant them license to do all sorts of other things, and you can breach the license in all sorts of ways. See for instance: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e4b1226a-b6b4-4915-8897-a8e474060481 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e4b1226a-b6b4... My main point, though, is that simply informing CNET that they are in violation of a program's license should be enough to make them stop, in theory. You may not need a DMCA takedown to do it, though one wouldn't hurt. > Absent a license, there is nothing permitting the redistributing of software. That's not true, because of fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use. > if you do not fulfill the terms of the license, you have no license to distribute, and are violating copyright. You may still have a license to distribute. You just aren't, in this case, distributing in accordance with that license. Licenses don't necessarily terminate upon violation (though they often do).

srtjstjsj 5y ago
Can you find one case ever where distributing an entire copyright-protected unlicensed software program was ruled fair use?
- ivraatiems 5y ago
  Sure, though it may depend on how you define "entire program". https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/a-short-history-of-the-fair-use-defense-3540274/ https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/a-short-history-of-the-fai... has a few, including Sony Computer Entm’t, Inc. v. Connectix Corp., where the entirety of the BIOS for the PlayStation was copied. I think that counts as an entire, copyright-protected, unlicensed piece of software. I suppose one could argue the BIOS were not necessarily "redistributed", depending on how you define that term, but I think it counts. There are some other examples in there as well.