Re: A Little Linguistic Playground

On Fri, 26 Mar 1999, Mark Lemley <mlemley[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu> wrote:
>
> On 03/25/1999, Llew Gibbons <lgibbons[_at_]sprintmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Mark Lemley <mlemley[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu> wrote:
> > >
> > > A license does not release the work into the public domain. First,
> > > it must be granted to a specific party.
> >
> > Why do you contend that the license must be to a specific party,
> > as opposed to a general license to all the world or substantial subset
> > thereof.
>
> OK, I confess I'm speculating here -- and I am certainly not a contracts
> scholar. But a license is a contract, and my dim recollection of first
> year contracts is that you can't enter into an executory contract with
> the whole world, including people yet unborn. So either such a
> "license" would be an abandonment or estoppel -- subjects others have
> already discussed -- or it would constitute merely an offer of contract
> (perhaps one accepted by detrimental reliance?).
>
> Am I wrong on my contract law?

Of course not. The "decopyright" forces are trying to make a revokable offer, not accepted, with no consideration, and then want to enforce it. They have a writing, perhaps, but it is not "signed" (witness your recent law review article, which had copyright "removed", but not by you).

If, and that is a big IF, the person applying the "decopyright" statement was the owner of the copyright and had the authority to abandon same (this is very often not the case, with the misunderstanding by the public of work for hire, or joint authorship), the "abandonment" of copyright would not be effective if the author were not competent (a 14 year old author, for example), or if it were placed there without the true author's permission. In any event, without a valid contract, the person "abandoning" copyright can change their mind, revoke the abandonment, and then the subsequent copier is infringing.

-- 
Thomas E. Workman Jr.
41 Harrison Street
Taunton, MA 02780

EMAIL: tworkman[_at_]erols.com
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