What&#39;s the license of a license?
<p>If I were to take license texts of publicy available licenses, such as the WTFPL, to add some paragraphs and create my own license, which I then ship with content created by me, would that be legal? What about AGB's for example?</p>

<p>I'm sure companies put a lot of work/money in form of lawyers into writing the terms, and often it can't be prevented to make them open source.</p>

<p>Three options seem to be plausible to me: (a) license not yet specified and anything possible (b) public domain (c) same license as the license if a license.</p>

<p>(Initially intended to include the here used CC BY-SA 4.0, but after some additional search I found out that all CC licenses are itself licensed public domain. The question remains for the WTFPL for example, which is clearly copyrighted but without a license for the license given. Could use of the text be revoked / sued?)</p>

<p>Whenever there is a license to share things, the license creator wants the license to be widely used, but absolutely does <em>not</em> want slightly different licenses that could be used to trick people, or that just cause legal problems when used. </p>

<p>Normal copyright law applies. And for the reasons above, the GPL license as an example allows you to copy the license verbatim but absolutely doesn’t allow you to make any modifications other than changing who is the person licensing a work. </p>

<p>I would be curious what happens legally if someone licenses something with a sneakily modified copy of the GPL and then makes claims against a licensee who assumed it was the original GPL. </p>

<p>The license is, unless otherwise stated, normal copyright terms - as in, unless it or the copyright owner grants you more permission, you cannot copy or modify it for your own use.</p>

licensing