[scribus] Copyright -- Free to copy license (Murray Strome)

Lars O. Grobe grobe at gmx.net
Tue Aug 12 08:57:26 CEST 2008


>
> So rather than worry about licenses, one should have a strategy for 
> enforcement

That is why it is adviced to have a copy of the license in the document. 
By having the license as part of the work, it is easier to get e.g. 
someone who uses your work in a derived book "under its own license", 
not allowing others to copy what he copied from you. These things are 
meant to prevent free work to get absorbed and locked-in into 
restrictive licenses. That is one of the few reasons to think about 
licenses if you want to publish for free. If a copy of the license does 
not come with the document, it will be more difficult to convinde a 
judge that the one who violated the terms had actually been aware of 
them and agreed, as the source is not clear and he can claim that he got 
it from somewhere without knowing these terms. That is true with any 
license. For that reason, a license text is usually put in each source 
file of open source projects (not the complete text, which gets 
distributed seperately).

As long as you do not plan to inforce your rights, e.g. if you would 
just ignore commercial use by others without keeping the terms, you do 
not have to worry about this.

CU Lars.




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