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A bundle of software rights and duties

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Abstract

Like the ownership of physical property, the issues computer software ownership raises can be understood as concerns over how various rights and duties over software are shared between owners and users. The powers of software owners are defined in software licenses, the legal agreements defining what users can and cannot do with a particular program. To help clarify how these licenses permit and restrict users’ actions, here I present a conceptual framework of software rights and duties that is inspired by the terms of various proprietary, open source, and free software licenses. To clarify the relationships defined by these rights and duties, this framework distinguishes between software creators (the original developer), custodians (those who can control its use), and users (those who utilise the software). I define the various rights and duties that can be shared between these parties and how these rights and duties relate to each other. I conclude with a brief example of how this framework can be used by defining the concepts of free software and copyleft in terms of rights and duties.

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Notes

  1. Munzer (1990), p. 16.

  2. Honoré (1968), pp. 112–113.

  3. Classen (2008), p. 11.

  4. The practical details of how software licenses work is described in Classen (2008). A number of software licenses are described in depth (with an emphasis on free and open source licenses) in St. Laurent (2004).

  5. Honoré (1968) and Hohfeld (2001), pp. 11–31.

  6. Honoré (1968), p. 112.

  7. Ibid., pp. 113–114.

  8. Hohfeld (2001), p. 12.

  9. This is the central concept behind shareware. See Cifuentes and Fitzgerald (1997), pp. 457–458.

  10. Free Software Foundation (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html).

  11. The terms ‘software’ and ‘program’ can be used interchangeably.

  12. Software licenses often attempt to deny users the ability to reverse-engineer the software they cover. See Lessig (2002), pp. 185–186.

  13. Copyright, patents, trade secrets and how they relate to software are further described in Classen (2008), pp. 11–16.

  14. Hettinger (1989), p. 34.

  15. Classen (2008), p, 15.

  16. Wetzel (http://www.plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/types-tokens/), Wilson (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~rehbjgs/docs/ontology-ip.pdf), Wilson’s paper is forthcoming in The Monist in 2010.

  17. Honoré (1968), p. 113.

  18. Distinguishing between creator and custodian is important for personality-based justifications for creators to hold particular rights and duties.

  19. Classen (2008), p. 83.

  20. Ibid., p. 16.

  21. St. Laurent (2004), pp. 171–173.

  22. The split between GNU Emacs and XEmacs is described in Turnbull (http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html).

  23. Raymond (http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/).

  24. Honoré (1968), p. 116.

  25. Some of Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative licenses are examples of this, as the licensee can read the source code of a particular program but is limited in what she can do with it. See St. Laurent (2004), pp. 144–146.

  26. Classen (2008), p. 86.

  27. Stamatoudi (2002), pp. 160–164.

  28. Hughes (1988), p. 342.

  29. Sun Microsystems (http://java.sun.com/applets/).

  30. An example of this is ‘self-modifying’ or ‘self-adaptive’ software, i.e., software that rewrites part of itself during the normal course of its operation.

  31. St. Laurent (2004), pp. 11–13.

  32. This is the case with the GNU General Public License. See Free Software Foundation (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html).

  33. Honoré (1968), pp. 117–118.

  34. This is quite common for video games.

  35. Honoré (1968), p. 116.

  36. Ibid., p. 118.

  37. Free Software Foundation (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).

  38. St. Laurent (2004), pp. 35–49, 14–17.

  39. Free Software Foundation (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html).

  40. Kuhn and Stallman (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html).

  41. Watson (http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/free-software-philosophy.html).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Julian Lamont, Kimberlee Weatherall, Fabien Medvecky, and the two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia

    David M. Douglas

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Correspondence to David M. Douglas.

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Douglas, D.M. A bundle of software rights and duties. Ethics Inf Technol 13, 185–197 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-010-9229-3

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