The term "proprietary license" is that kind of written license which company adds to their products which explicit state what users can and can not do, often with a explicit threat to underline it.
Works that do not have a license is normally refereed as orphan works. While you could call it proprietary, it is by definition not proprietary licensed.
> Works that do not have a license is normally refereed as orphan works.
No, that's just a copyrighted work with no published license (e.g., most dead tree books), for which you must contact the copyright holder if you want any kind of license.
An orphan work is a copyrighted work for which the rightsholders are unknown are uncontactable, and which it is therefore impossible to even attempt to negotiate a license.
It is kind of hard to contact the copyright holder if there is no copyright license with a notice in it which says who the author is.
Technically possible, unlikely in practice, and I doubt anyone could find a proprietary product being sold in a store that does not have a license. For all practical purposes, where would you find proprietary work used in a proprietary setting but without a proprietary license?
You're changing the subject a bit. First you were talking about "works that do not have a license" and now you're talking about specifically proprietary works.
As an example, there are any number of projects on github without any explicit license. That does not make them orphaned, nor make them freely available for use. We've come across a couple that we wanted to use and our first step was to work with the authors to get them licensed under some clear terms.
Just because it's "hard to contact the copyright holder" doesn't make it legal (or in my opinion, moral) to take their work and use it however you judge best.
Who said anything about "freely available for use"? The whole discussion here has been about proprietary licensed works. Karunamon said that proprietary licenses did not exist, because works are automatically copyrighted and I disagreed.
A project on github without a license is not proprietary licensed, but they are copyrighted. If such work ends up in the hand of someone which is not the author, then one would have to ask under what permission (license) that happened.
> A project on github without a license is not proprietary licensed, but they are copyrighted.
The content of a project on Github that is publicly viewable arguably also is minimally licensed as required by the Github terms of service, to wit, the Github project owner "agrees to allow others to view and fork" the project repository (see Github Terms of Service [0], F.3).
Hardcopy books would fall under the implied license doctrine.
It's clear from the conduct of the parties to the transaction that a limited license for reading is intended, and the parties just never bothered to make an explicit license to memorialize that agreement.
> Hardcopy books would fall under the implied license doctrine.
One might be able to craft a colorable argument that an implied license to some right that is exclusive under copyright is created in the usual sale of a hardcopy book -- but you certainly haven't yet done so.
> It's clear from the conduct of the parties to the transaction that a limited license for reading is intended,
"Reading" isn't -- in the US, at any rate -- an exclusive right under copyright [0], so no license is necessary.
Works that do not have a license is normally refereed as orphan works. While you could call it proprietary, it is by definition not proprietary licensed.