FSF Threatens GPL Lawsuit

An anonymous reader writes "Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News reports that OpenTV is violating the GNU General Public License. He notes that the Free Software Foundation is threatening to file a lawsuit in the case. If you haven't become an associate member of the FSF yet, now would be a good time!" Note that Gillmor is reporting the FSF's claim of violation, not making it himself.

Comments

Re:But...

[nuggz]

decent programmers who choose to give their work away should not be taken advantage of.

Sure they should, they gave it away!

Now those who license it under the GPL did NOT give it away and should have their license respected.

Back before my time the BSD license said you had to display the credits. Some little company (AT&T wasn't it) didn't want to play by the rules, I wonder how that turned out?
The old BSD license was very close to giving it away, much closer then the GPL, and courts ruled it was enforcable. I would be surprised if the GPL was any less valid.

Re:Too little too late.

[DustMagnet]

Actually, there is no question of damages but, rather a question of how much and to who?

I'd call those big questions of damages. How much damage might be found to be zero. That could be bad news for GPL.

stealing

[sacrilicious]

As a final note cases such as these serve as a warning to any other potentially unscrupulous individuals that may have considered stealing GPL code.

I feel obligated to point out that violation of the GPL is not stealing... it is copyright/license infringement.

Slashdot discussions hold various examples of folks who refer to p2p copyrighted file sharing as "stealing". Some people (with whom I agree) then respond that this is not an example of stealing, it is an example of copyright infringement. This clarification is not intended to condone (or condemn) the sharing of copyrighted material; the point is to not sink to the same level of newspeak as the RIAA/MPAA which claims (for example) that not watching commercials is "stealing". The reason this is important is that it has everything to do with what legal analysis and remedies can and should be brought to bear on the matter.

When something has been stolen, there are clear answers to the questions (1) who has lost, and (2) how much. It is in the world of copyright infringement that these questions become enormously debatable.

Re:Everyone loses

[yaphadam097]

Everyone lost. We could have ALL (minus 1) had the benefit of this software for free. The very first person would have to purchase it, but then could freely redistribute to the world.

I hope this is not the argument that is used in court, because I think it misrepresents the intent of the GPL. Claiming that everyone in the community was damaged because they didn't get the benefit of this software without paying for it sounds a lot like the viral GPL that Microsoft warned about.

I think the more relevant point is that by using other people's work as the basis of their software they entered into a contract which said that others could do the same. They have an obligation under that contract to make their work available for others to learn from, adapt, and improve upon.

The intention of the GPL is not, IMO, to allow consumers to have access to other people's work for free. "Free as in beer" access to software is a natural consequence of the GPL that we sometimes benefit from. It is not a requirement nor is it the intent.

...we also lost the ability to improve the software. Anyone who wanted a feature that was not added lost out.

That's the relevent point! Take that one to court but leave the first part about everyone getting it for free (As in beer) out.