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On 09/11/06 10:10:11, Peter Lloyd-Jones wrote: Further to this issue:When a copyright owner grants a nonexclusive license to use the owner’s copyrighted materials, the owner waives the right to sue the licensee for infringement and can only sue for breach of contract. See Sun Microsystems, Inc. v. Microsoft, Inc., 188 F.3d 1115, 1121 (9th Cir.1999).
http://tinyurl.com/yfjtmqIn the JRMI case, this is used to make a claim to undermine the open source licence. It specifically related to Microsoft J++ which was a Java Virtual Machine that was modified in a way that it broke Sun's compatibility tests (amongst other changes) such that tools using J++ produced code that could only run on platforms that have a J++ compatible Java virtual machine which, unsurprisingly, only ran on MS Windows. Sun want Java to be platform independent so this went against the grain (to put it mildly).
However, the full quote is: 6. Copyrights and Intellectual Property O53(1), 53.2A copyright owner who grants a non- exclusive license to use his copyrighted material generally waives his right to sue the licensee for copyright infringement and can sue only for breach of contract; if, however, a license is limited in scope and the licensee acts outside the scope, the licensor can bring an action for copyright infringement.
http://tinyurl.com/yznxpdi.e. the reference is incomplete. The key now comes down to whether the Artistic Licence is non-exclusive or whether it can be deemed "limited in scope" AND the infringement is also deemed to be outside that declared scope.
Note also how the word 'generally' has been dropped from the quote. In contrast to the Artistic Licence, the GPL contains: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope."i.e. the scope of the licence is limited to copying, distribution and modification *only*.
For comparison, the Artistic Licence is here: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.phpLong licences are not necessarily any more precise than a short licence but the Artistic Licence is a lesson in ambiguity.
-- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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