Re: non commercial use

[ On Sunday, April 27, 2003 at 09:51:00 (-0400), Jon Pastore wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: non commercial use
>
> I'm no legal expert but I would say this is where the licensing comes in to
> play.

What do you mean by "licensing"? The only license for the free version of SSH is just the copyright license and it even goes so far as to allow you to redistribute more copies so long as you don't make commercial profit from them. For example I have a copy of the source archive on my FTP mirror site. If I'm not mistaken the copyright license for SSH also allows one to create derrivative works, such as those with new patches for fixes and features, etc.

Some people, including Richard Stallman and the legal advisors he has conferred with, argue that a copyright license can include terms that extend beyond the reach of the copyright law (as the GPL does). However such terms can only come into effect if a person wishes to distribute the work under the terms of the copyright license. The only thing any copyright license can do is grant the rights provided for under copyright law. If all you want to do is obtain one legal copy of a program and then run it for whatever purpose on your own computer, then you're not excercising any of the rights afforded to the author by copyright law. I.e. under copyright law the SSH folks cannot hold you to any restrictions not afforded to them by copyright law unless you actually (re)distribute copies of their software.

On the other hand there are those who argue that an attempt to go outside the provisions of copyright law in a copyright license makes the whole thing invalid, in which case only the default protections of the copyright law wouldd apply. E.g. this may be the case in Canada where if I understand correctly such a thing would be called a "shrink wrap license", and thus would actually be illegal (i.e. I believe it is still against the law to even try to use a "shrink wrap license" here, at least on a commercial product). If this is true then given the lack of any legal copyright license on the software, and the fact that free and anonymous distribution of the software has been granted directly from the owner's own Internet server(s), and the fact that they've also allowed mirror copies, well then it's just as likely that the software would be considered to have been placed in the Public Domain as it would be to consider it to still be covered by the default provisions of the Copyright Act. (though I'm guessing the law would err on the side of the party with the deepest pockets)

> I alway thought copyright protected you from theft of concept and
> more of an intelectual property protection

No, copyright only protects the actual expression of a concept, not the underlying concept itself. If you wish to try to protect the very concept of some idea then you may be able to do so with a patent, assuming the patent laws in your jurisdiction will cover the kind of concept you're trying to protect. Luckily in Canada we still don't have patent protection for software. :-)

Primarily copyright laws allow the proper owner of the copyright on a work to pursue damages if someone else tries to profit from selling copies of that work. They also protect the author from certain types of intellectual slander and so on. That's why copyright licenses on "freeware" will grant the right to redistribute the software, perhaps even with modifications, but then will say "All other rights reserved". Copyright in many places is automatic, such as my copyright under the Canadian Copyright Act on this e-mail message. :-)

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> and licensing controls execution.
> like you can do what ever as long as you distro the code or you only get to
> run this on 20 computers...

I don't currently know of any Copyright Law in any jurisdiction which has a provision for "licensing controls" in the sense I believe you mean here (though my (lay) knowledge is primarily of the Canadian Copyright Act, with some additional vague understanding of the profusion of tangled laws in the USA). As far as I know only contract law can do what you're suggesting. A license for end-use is really just a contract, and the intellectual propery in such cases is protected by tade secret law (as well as perhaps by a copyright and by additional non-disclosure agreements).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            ;           
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>