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GPL To Be Tested by Mattel?
radja writes, "It seems people are beginning to notice that CPHack falls under the GPL. According to this article in Wired, Mattel may have a little trouble getting CPHack off the Web." Check out yesterday's article about the win Mattel had recently with CPHack.
IAAL, and I think you're overlooking the fact that the GPL is not as other licenses. In general, licenses are not assignments of rights because they don't correct rights, because they are revocable. Commercial software licenses are generally revocable, and contain clauses detailing what is to happen in the event that (for example) Microsoft decides that it no longer wants to license Windows to you under the EULA.
The GPL is not revocable by the copyright holder, and thus, I think, has to be seen as an assignment of rights if the non-revocability is found to be binding. So my analysis of this would be that, yes, this case is potentially a test of the GPL, and yes, potentially (I feel uneasy speculating about an agreement I have never seen) the fact that the software was GPL'd could invalidate the settlement reached by the developers.
--John Montoya
(yeah, I do the streetlawyer trolls, but Im having a serious day today)
I am an attorney, but I"m probably not licensed in your jurisdiction. This is not legal advice. Get that from a lawyer who is licensed in your jurisdiction if you need any.
Everyone take a breath, and slow down. Whether Mattel backs down, or litigates and loses, this will *not* be a test of the GPL.
OK, repeat after me: this is not a test of the GPL.
If this is to litigate, it's going to turn on basic contract law principles
of license and assignments. The *only* issue of the GPL that is even relevant is the ability to redistribute, which is a licenseing issue. If the facts as described in the article are correct, Mattel can't call in the existing copies. But it isn't the GPL that's stopping them; it's the license.
Did I mention that this is a basic issue of license in general, and not the GPL?
hawk, esq.
As far as I'm concerned, the defendants were within the letter of the law, and Mattel should get some better lawyers. The confusion here is about copyright versus licensing. The original authors had full copyright to the original code, and they handed over all of the copyright (all rights and interests, etc.) that they possessed to Mattel.
However, they had previously granted a perpetual license to all distributers and redistributers of the code for distribution and use which cannot be terminated. Mattel didn't realize that at the time (or thought no one else would). So while the defendants weren't lying and complied with the agreement they made, that doesn't affect the fact that GPL'd versions of the code cannot be stopped by Mattel.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
This is something I've been wondering about. Is it necessary to quote to all the GPL boilerplate in order to have a binding GPL licence on a piece of software? The GPL is a standard piece of text that is well documented in many places on the Internet and I'm sure it has made its way into legal textbooks by now as well. Shouldn't it be enough to simply make reference to it and state that it is applicable to this program? Its not like there are different GPLs out there that might cause confusion. GPL is GPL.
By comparison, when you put a copyright notice on something, all you need is the word "copyright" or the © symbol. There is no requirement to quote the copyright act.
Ideology is for ideots.
What we're loosing sight of here is exactly what ownership is. You don't have to have ownership to use / distribute something. Consider commercial software (that allows you use but not distribution) and shareware (that allows you limited use until you pay a fee and often unlimited distribution). In neither case do you own the copyright to the software - but you are licensed to perform various actions with it.
Matel obviously wanted ownership to "kill" the offending code. But the GPL is a very different kind of license; in effect, it disables this legal tactic. I'm sure Matel's lawyers weren't expecting such a hack to be licensed, much less under such a non-standard license as the GPL.
Of course, Matel's ownership of this code is not without value. They can feel free to re-license it and develop closed improvements to it under that new license. They can lock up a niche market.
That is... until OpenCPHack comes along.
If the program is illegal, then the GPL does not give anyone any right to distribute it.
However the question is, is the program illegal? This has yet to be demonstrated. The illegal assignment of rights to Mattel which had already been assigned elsewhere does nothing to make the program illegal. The legality of the program is unchanged from before the settlement.
Whether the program is legal or not depends on whether the reverse engineering is considered to be legitimate under any of the reverse-engineering clauses of relevent copyright laws in the relevent countries. This has yet to be proven one way or the other.
What I haven't seen is any laws which might make the essay, which is far more damaging than the program, illegal.
Suppose, now, that the cphack authors had included an extra clause in the license. And suppose this extra clause said that no matter what, they couldn't be held liable for writing it. Do you think such a thing would stand up in court? Sorry, but if you break the law, not even a fine print disclaimer will save you.
Although if UCITA is passed, this sort of ridiculous license cluase may well become legal in some cases.