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Comment by boothby | Hacker News Reader

> ... without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use ...

> ... Permission is not granted to use this software ...

Is this going to hold up to legal scrutiny? It looks like it's blatantly contradicting itself. The author is calling it an "MIT" license, but does not appear to be associated with MIT -- is MIT cool with that? The author is not a lawyer. Nice concept, but I don't trust the execution.

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Judges handle stuff like this a lot, where people cobble together clauses to create a franken-contracts, and wind up with a lot of self contradictions. In general, specific clauses should win out over general clauses, so this in theory might hold up depending on the judge, but it's not advisable to use this in any real life setting. Also using the name MIT is how you end up with some of the complaints in the Neo4j lawsuit, and is also not advisable. OP should seek legal counsel.

> where people cobble together clauses to create a franken-contracts

A blight in any number of industries. I'm most intimately familiar with construction. My go-to example is a project where the contract specifications from the Owner required, in one paragraph buried deeply within, that a certain critical person have a license for their craft.

Not a problem, that's how it usually goes and why the state issues licenses, after all. The problem was that the project was in Alaska, and the specifications explicitly listed out a license in Virginia.

> to any person obtaining a copy

A relevant distinction, perhaps

IANAL, but it sounds like what a "person" obtaining a copy means could be challenging to define. If I open my browser, navigate to a page containing the code, and click some type of download button, I think it would be hard to argue that I was not a person obtaining a copy. What if I write a crawler and my crawler downloads a copy of the code for me? Am I still a person obtaining a copy?

Rather ambiguous, I agree. Sadly it has resulted in billion-dollar multinational commercial entities getting away with stealing and fencing near endless amounts of otherwise protected data by claiming "fair-use".

Basilisks are not humans, and the law needs to catch up to this fact.

What is the license on the MIT license?

Mostly irrelevant. What's at issue here is trading on MIT's name.

There's currently a trademark fight happening around AGPLv3+CC, because "AGPL" is a trademark not owned by the people trying to combine the AGPL with the Commons Clause. Might be worth looking into that.

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