Larry Lessig reports some exciting, huge and important news: free licenses upheld:
So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge.
I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.
In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.
Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.
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I do wish this was more clear. For instance, in the quoted paragraphs, who is "you"???? The infringer or the infringee? Didn't we want covenants rather than conditions? I don't think I understand this yet.
I'll try the three paragraph explanation.
All "Open","GPL", "creative commons" licenses say something like "you the user can do anything you want with this material, even further distribute it, PROVIDED THAT you meet some conditions. Conditions like providing the source code for programs etc.
The district court said that is fine but the remedy if a person gets the material and breaks the conditions and still distributes it isn't copyright law - it is contract law, and you as the person putting out the license would have to sue for monetary damages from the person breaking the conditions. This is useless for open source software. What monetary damages? Basically it would mean that anybody could take Open Source Software and use it any way they want and would only have to worry about being taken to court for non-existent damages. It was a stupid ruling.
The appeals court said no, this is not a contract thingie this is a copyright issue just like the license plainly says. (Reading it they seem to subtly rip on the lower court) It uses the "provided by" language that all copyright licenses use to set conditions (restrictions) on use. Thus the person issuing the license can use copyright law to go after the person breaking the terms. This means they can get an injunction stopping the terms breaker from distribution of the material and seeking statutory damages. This puts the teeth back into the GPL and other open source licenses.
Does that Help somewhat?
I'm glad to see that this issue ended up in the right place. The lower court ruling leaned well toward head explosion territory.
I find the amount of confusion, popularly and among people who ought to know better, about various copyleft licenses quite baffling. Their purpose is somewhat unusual(though hardly new at this point); but most of them are models of concision and clarity by the standards of license agreements and they rest on copyright law in fashion largely equivalent to that of most proprietary licenses. I have a hard time deciding if people are just that confused, or if something about the concept really bugs them.
The beautiful thing about this is the software and context involved.
The open source guy is a train hobbiest who developed a track layout framework that allowed his common system to control layouts from many suppliers if the appropriate drivers were installed. Without thinking about it too much he made it open source, but then Katzer and co (the infringers) stole it (and all the drivers developed by many people), closed it and started selling it.
A couple of years ago Jacobsen, the open source guy, squealed in pain and anguish questioning whether open source was workable at all. He subsequently got a lot of help and now appears to have won.
So what we have is a guy who trusted open source without much thought, subsequently felt he'd been conned, and who has now been vindicated and given protection by the court on an open source licence.
Beautiful! We couldn't have hoped for a better outcome.
Ah, I get it now. Perfect. Thanks.