Re: logos and the BSD license

Peter Eisentraut wrote:

>Am Mittwoch, 23. August 2006 18:29 schrieb Joshua D. Drake:
>
>
>>Well, in the spirit of the BSD I would say:
>>
>>Attribution (by)
>>
>>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
>>
>>
>
>Well, the main problem with that license is that it prohibits you from copying
>the works over encrypted links or storing the works on encrypted media or a
>computer protected by a password.
>
>"You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
>digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control
>access"
>
>The more general problem is that it is excessively complicated and ambiguously
>worded and doesn't achieve anything beyond what the BSD license does.
>
>If the BSD license is too complicated still, I can offer the following
>alternative license: "You may use, modify and redistribute this software as
>you wish."
>
>
>
Are you a lawyer? If not, I'd be carefull about jumping to conclusions
about what a license does or doesn't mean. Note, I'm not a lawyer
either, so I can't definitively say that the license *doesn't* mean what
you think it means. But I do know that the law and legal documents
(like licenses) are similiar to programming, in which they have taken
common english words and turned them into terms of the art- much like
programmers have with 'object', 'function', 'procedure', etc. People
not familiar with programming might *think* they know what we mean when
we talk about objects, but they really don't. The core here is the word
"distribute". What does the legal meaning (as opposed to the common
meaning) of the word "distribute" mean? I will comment that Lawerence
Lessig *is* a lawyer, and thus presumably knows what the legal meaning
(as opposed to the common meaning) of the word 'distribute' is.

As a side note, I'd no more trust licenses written by programmers than I
would code written by lawyers, for much the same reason.

Brian