[thelist] [OT] how to grant a commercial license.

VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK volkan.ozcelik at gmail.com
Tue Nov 29 01:45:09 CST 2005


merhaba workers of the web!

Here comes yet another legal question.

As you may have known, I have two (uncommercially free / creative
commons uncommercial share alike) products namely; "sardalya" (a dhtml
framework) and "orkinos" (a javascript compression utility).

I constantly enhance them; I may include more stuff to my line of
products, I may add more features to the products.

Nowadays I receive several requests from people asking whether they
may use those products in a commercial environment and if so how.

So I am in need of writing a commercial license (or licenses).

The normal procedure would be to register your product(s); get a
patent for them; consult a lawyer, so on and so forth.

However, imho, this would overkill for a (uncommercially) free
javascript api. Moreover, it is really hard to prove that your js
thingy is unique. There are thousands of people around, doing the same
thing in thousands of different ways.

So what I plan to do is to talk to friend of mine (attending to a law
school in here) and write together an adequately legal disclaimer
telling what the prospective user may and may not do under what
conditions.

After this much introduction my questions are:

- Is it enough to send the prospect, client, whoever, this license as
a text file and tell them "these are my terms do you accept"?.

- I have not used a digital signature and don't know how it works. Is
it usable/applicable here? How much does it costs? How much time does
it take to set up? Does it overkill?

My point is somehow I should ensure the uniqueness of the license,
without diving very deep into legislatory details such as patenting
registering etc (in paper world this may have been done with a
"genuine product" hologram, may be).

So after brainstorming for a while I decided to  put the original
license text in the to my web server in the form

mywebserver/companyname/productname/procudtname_companyname_date_version_commerciallicense.txt

and indicate in the license file that the only true copy is the copy
on the server and client's copy does not give them any legal rights
(this is human readable text of course, the legally equivalent one may
be a lot longer with an unnecessary definitions part and
clarifications like server means blah blah; original copy means this;
client copy means that... 1. general terms etc. ...the boring
copyright stuff you know.)

So what is the best practice in this case?
Did you coincide with a similar situation?
What did you (or would you) do if you were me?

Thank you very much in advance;
--
Volkan Ozcelik
+>Yep! I'm blogging! : http://www.volkanozcelik.com/volkanozcelik/blog/
+> My projects/studies/trials/errors : http://www.sarmal.com/



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