As a retired physicist I must admit to full disclosure before I begin my rant. Many years ago I attended the school of physics at I.U. in Bloomington, Indiana. There I observed that when undergraduates washed out of the department, they were shipped up to IUPUI at Indianapolis and we made 'em lawyers (or dentists). Having declared this truth now let us begin. The GPL involves license law. The license concerns permission to use intellectual property (copyright) in the computer age. Much of the law about licenses is based in the Uniform Commercial Code section (2). The much hated UTICA was an attempt to establish a new sec.(2)B of the UCC. The GPL involves contract law between a copyright owner/licensee and a person who chooses to modify and/or distribute, with permission, the copyrighted material. My thinking is that the form of the contract is unilateral with an offerer and offeree who accepts by an act of performance. Much of the substantive contract law is based in the RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF TORTS. Now comes the fly in the ointment. The GPL involves an agreement establishing a legal trust (as in RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF TRUSTS). This trust is in the form of a "limited public" trust. The offeror grants permission to an offeree who, by accepting, must hold the granted permission in public trust for those who receive further distribution and thus the "contractual license trust or GPL" is perpetuated. As the copyright license is redistributed there is no direct connection "privity" between copyright holder and third party licensees. This causes great wailing and gnashing of teeth between "contract" barristers who must have privity and "trust" barristers who decry privity, since it is not required in legal trusts. Now in the study of physics if we observe that something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck we usually call it a "unilateral contract to establish a limited public license trust". I would would love to see the legal analysis from a real wanna-be washed out physicist concerning the general description of the GPL. Is it a bird, is it a plane or does it belong to Darl McBride ?
