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Comment by orasis | Hacker News Reader

What license is the MIT license itself released under? Can licenses be copied and modified willy-nilly or do you need to license a license?

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That's a great question. The short answer – no one knows. Technically someone does own the copyright to these words, and if they are able to prove it they could sue every project that uses or refers to it, which is a troubling thought. That is very unlikely to happen, however, since the license originated at MIT (as the name suggests) and the current version is the result of a lot of iteration and modification done by many people over many decades.

And trademark probably plays in too IANAL. I assume coming up with your own Creative Commons license unrelated to that organization would be problematic.

> Technically someone does own the copyright to these words, and if they are able to prove it they could sue every project that uses or refers to it, which is a troubling thought.

That seems unlikely to be true. Recipes can't be copyrighted because they're functional. Legal licenses are also functional.

(What's that? You think source code is functional? Shows what you know.)

No, the licenses themselves are protected by copyright as well. But the only license I can think of that explicitly states this fact is GPLv3, which begins:

  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.

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