IANAL: My understanding is that even if he were to revoke the license, any copies you already made under it would remain your legal property, as they were made lawfully. It's the right to copy (naturally the author's exclusive right) the license is giving you. Revoking that right prevents you from making future copies, but would have no power to make you destroy the ones you already have.
No it doesn't. 17 USC 117 refers to software that you already have a licence for, and covers exemptions to copyright. ie. you're allowed to make a backup of software, you're allowed to transfer your licence to someone else and you're allowed to run it if you only use it to fix .
> 17 USC 117 refers to software that you already have a licence for
No, it refers to software that you own a copy of. Termination of a copyright license does not terminate your ownership of copies that you already have, if they were made lawfully and distributed to you lawfully.
A good quick and dirty test to see if you need a copyright license in order to legally do something is to ask yourself what the copyright owner would allege in his pleadings if he were to sue you.
Hmm, maybe you're right, but most software licences that I can lay hands on from a quick Google search (other than the GPL) explicitly mention 'use' and termination. For example, the BSD licence:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms,
with or without modification, are permitted provided
that the following conditions are met:
If what you were saying is true though, it would mean that the BSD licence is essentially unenforceable, since once I have a copy, it can't be taken away.
That's not copyright law. Copyright law governs the right to make copies and distribute copies. Use of a copy you legally acquired can only possibly be restricted by a license agreement; contract law.
Copyright grants 5 exclusive rights to the authors of a work. Two of them are creating copies and distributing copies. Two of the others don't really apply to executing software (public display and performance of audiovisual works), and the last is the creation of derivative works.
What the owners of some copies of code do with them is not something the author gains any control of. That can only be restricted by the license, which as it says, is governed by applicable contract law.
Copyright extends to other rights too, not just copying: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright For instance, your link makes no mention of moral rights.
In the case of software licenses such as the GPL, it's a weird amalgalm of the two. The only thing which gives you the right to make a copy of the software and use it is the license. If the license becomes invalid for whatever reason (eg. revoked by Zed) then you have an illegal copy of the software, and are pursued under copyright law, not contract law.
Right?