I am writing a software license myself before I hire a lawyer.
Is it legal to copy a software license text from other companies to write my own?
I could not find anyone talking about the copyright of the software license itself. But many software licenses have the same text.
I found this post (Is it legal to copy a website's terms of use?) but not sure if this applies to a software license
Software licenses are protected by copyright, meaning that you need the author's permission to copy them. One way to get permission is to buy a license, since many of them are for sale. Sometimes (e.g. CC licenses) a license to copy the license is granted. You can also read and understand what is in a license, and use that knowledge to write your own. This is different from copying the license, since what you are extracting from the existing licenses is the ideas, not the specific expression.
Contracts and other legal documents, of which software licenses would fall, are protected by copyright, in general. However, not every contract would be; according to Kenneth Adams (NY Law Journal, 2006:
That doesn’t mean that every contract is so protected. If you copy someone else’s contract verbatim, changing only the party names, dates, and similar details, a court would likely find the contract insufficiently original and creative to support a claim of copyright violation if in turn someone were to copy your contract.
That said, a contract still can be protected by copyright (and, similarly, a software license) if it has some unique, "creative" additions to make it separate from, well, all of the other nearly identical licenses out there. The article above cites American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus v. Assurant, Inc. (N.D. Ga. 2006) in supporting that contracts can be protected by copyright; in that case, Aflac wrote contracts in a "narrative" style that was more easily read by their customers, and Assurant copied those. The court held they were protected by copyright.
The article goes on to explore whether lawyers copying bits of other contracts are likely violating copyright, and determines that for the most part they aren't, though not because of fair use; but rather, because the contracts they're copying are for the most part copies of copies of copies, and thus aren't themselves protected by copyright any more than I would be protected if I typed out Romeo and Juliet.
Does such copying constitute fair use? There’s precious little to suggest that it does. If a law firm is able to produce for its clients contracts that are distinctive in terms of substance or language, the law firm would derive a competitive advantage that it would lose if its competitors were able to copy those contracts with impunity. But that’s not to say that corporate lawyers should stop copying from contracts they find on EDGAR or elsewhere. It’s a safe assumption that the vast majority of contracts are either outright copies that aren’t entitled to copyright protection or contracts that derive copyright protection from their status as compilations. Because any compilation contract would resemble countless other contracts, a law firm would likely have a hard time demonstrating breach of copyright of its compilation contract.
So the answer seems to be "sort of" - if you're copying a software license that is effectively the same as every other software license out there, then you're probably safe. Just don't copy one that's distinctive - do some searches to make sure what you're copying has a few thousand Google hits from different sites.
Or, just use one of the many CC licenses, which will happily allow you to use their text.
It depends, which license do you want to copy?
If it's a FOSS license like the GNU GPL, the Apache License, or one of the BSD license variants, go for it. With the special exception of custom licenses created for specific projects, all FOSS licenses either have the required permission explicitly or implicitly stated in the license or have had the copyright holder consign the license to the public domain (or put the license text under a separate license that allows for copying, such as CC-BY-SA). Some minimal provision along these lines is actually required for a true copyleft license, because you have to allow the user to copy the license for any derivative works that they want to (or are required to) place under the same license terms.
If, however, it's the EULA for a piece of proprietary software, you're out of luck, because those usually cover themselves under the same licensure (in many cases, they're classified as part of the software itself) and even if they aren't the copyright holder has generally not granted any rights for usage by third parties of the license text.
Practically anything in writing is protected by copyright, without any need to mention it. Someone paid a lawyer good money to write a license for them, so that person won’t be happy if you copy it.
There are some unusual cases: The GPL license allows you to copy the license, but the copyright owners will get very, very angry if you modify the license in any way.
