Warp wrote:
>   I don't know how it is in the US, but at least here contracts cannot
> forbid things which are explicitly stated as basic rights by law.

Same here - you cannot, for example, contractually agree to sell your 
organs. But there's also a bunch of things that the law states how it works, 
and you're allowed to waive those rights. That's kind of what I was talking 
about.

For example, I have copyright on anything I write, but I can sign a contract 
to sell that copyright to you.

There are even cases where we passed laws like "if you sign a waiver, and 
then later find out something that wasn't disclosed, the waiver doesn't 
cover that."  What happened?  Now all the contracts just include a clause 
that says "if you sign this waiver, and you later find something the waiver 
doesn't cover, you agree to waive that too."  Kind of not too useful once 
the lawyers figure out how to get around it.

> moreover it explicitly says that any part
> of the program's license agreement which prohibits backupping is
> non-enforceable.

That's what we would need to have in the laws here. It is complicated, of 
course, by having way too many jurisdictions.

>   The new Finnish copyright law is even more mangled. Not even the people
> who wrote it seem to fully understand it. Some high-ranked police official
> even commented publicly that laws that cannot be unambiguously interpreted
> and enforced make no sense.

They're unconstitutional here, but it's a fairly hard battle to win.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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