HACKER Q&A
📣 yarg

Are licensing agreemements protected by copyright law?


It's a strange question perhaps, but copyright law can be applied to creative works and it seems that most license agreements would satisfy that to some extent.

There's a fair use argument: but that seems to me like it should only extend to those who are licensed the software and anyone that they reasonably need to share it with (e.g.: legal or technical counsel).

Even then, fair use for licensees would extend only so far as using the license with regards to the licensed content;

Fair use would not permit the license being repurposed for use with other software.

I imagine that it's jurisdictional to some extent (or that I'm an idiot, who should just shut up already).


  👤 mytailorisrich Accepted Answer ✓
Yes, license agreements are copyrighted by default in the same way as everything else.

You may have noticed the very top of the GPL v.3, for instance:

Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <https://fsf.org/>

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.