Re: Final text of GPL v3 (original) (raw)

On Sun, 1 Jul 2007 00:24:58 -0700 Sean Kellogg wrote:

On Saturday 30 June 2007 09:56:44 am Francesco Poli wrote:

On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:31:29 +0100 Anthony Towns wrote:

Francesco is not a lawyer,

I explicitly wrote this disclaimer in my comment message ("The usual disclaimers: IANAL, IANADD."): I cannot understand why you seem to have such fun in pointing fingers at other people and repeating "he/she's not a lawyer!", "he/she's not a Debian developer!"...

Francesco... as I've said on this list before, "IANAL" is not a sufficient disclaimer. Nor is saying "this is not legal advice."

Mmmh, I take note: disclaimers are useless.

There are laws, criminal laws, against the providing of legal advice by those who not certified by the Bar Association within the jurisdiction the advice is given in. There is no exception provided by adding disclaimers, there is only the question of whether or not legal advice was given.

You can raise questions as to whether something is, or is not, legal advice. But definitive statements like "I wish it could, but I am afraid it cannot..." in response to a question about the meaning of a particular term in a legal document is arguably legal advice.

I was merely giving my own lay-person opinion about what I think would be the correct interpretation of a clause in a legal document (after having explicitly stated that I am not a lawyer). I'm having a hard time in believing that this is considered providing legal advice, in Italy or elsewhere...

If only lawyers in their own jurisdictions are legally allowed to give such answers to questions directed to debian-legal, then I'm afraid the Debian Project should shut this list down ASAP. Or, at least, explicitly warn that only lawyers (certified to practice law in every jurisdiction reached by Debian mailing lists!) are allowed to provide answers. At that point, I think that most threads would become single-message... :-(

[...]

Here, on an email list entitled "debian-legal" I think one might have a reasonable expectation that actual lawyers were providing advice.

The description[1] of the list states:

| debian-legal mailing list | Copyright, licensing and patent issues | | Discussions about legality issues such as copyrights, patents etc. | | This list is not moderated; posting is allowed by anyone.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/

I have never had the expectation that answers on debian-legal were being given (only) by actual lawyers. Maybe I have strange expectations or lack thereof...

To that end, Mr. Towns' continued reminders that you are not, in fact, a lawyer, is helpful to those who may be mistaken that you are, as it would appear, providing legal advice.

Mmmmh, I take note: disclaimers are useful.

Now, I wonder: if IANAL disclaimers are useless, why HINAL (He Is Not A Lawyer) disclaimers are useful?!?

Puzzled.

-- http://frx.netsons.org/doc/nanodocs/testing_workstation_install.html Need to read a Debian testing installation walk-through? ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4

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