[plug] [OT] Software licences seminar

[Jeremy Malcolm]

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I'm organising a seminar on free software licenses for the WA Society
for Computers and the Law for some time in November.  Some of you may
remember the discussion about this on Slashdot when the whole
Mattel/Cyberpatrol thing erupted.

For those who don't remember, some hackers wrote a program (cphack)
that unencrypted the list of banned sites in the Cyberpatrol
censorware.  Mattel which owns Cyberpatrol threatened to sue their
asses off.  They freaked out and sold their rights to cphack to Mattel
for $1.  Mattel's lawyers then threatened all of the mirror sites that
they were now the copyright owners in cphack and please remove cphack
from your site or we'll sue your ass off too.

Anyway, the issue that arose was that cphack had apparently been
released under the GPL which gave everyone an irrevocable license to
do whatever the hell they wanted with it.  The problem is that
legally, generally if a licence is given for free, it can't be made
irrevocable even if that is what it says.

For various reasons the Mattel case is not the paradigm example of
what the problem is, but the problem is easy enough to see.  If a
copyright owner threatened to sue every member of the Linux kernel
development team unless they sold the Linux kernel to them for $1,
then changed the license terms for the kernel, it could be the end of
free software as we know it.

Anyway, the reason why I'm posting this drivel is just because I would
like to find someone active in the free software community to speak on
this topic.  I know a lot of lawyers who could (and one or more of
whom probably will) speak at the seminar, but everyone hates to hear
lawyers speak.

Does anyone knows of any free software personalities who might be in
Perth around November (either living here or visiting) whom I might
ask to speak at the seminar?  WASCAL hasn't got any money to pay
airfares unfortunately.  Please email me off-list if you have any
suggestions.

TIA

- -- 
JEREMY MALCOLM Jeremy at Malcolm.wattle.id.au http://malcolm.wattle.id.au
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