Slashdot Mirror
German Court Says GPL is Valid
Axel Metzger writes "The Munich District Court has ruled on May 19, 2004 that the main clauses of the GNU General Public License are valid under German copyright and contract law. This seems to be the first judgment worldwide proofing the validity of the most popular free software license. The ruling is a confirmation of the preliminary injunction of April 2, 2004. The new judgment gives on 20 pages the reasons for the ruling. It states explicitly that the terms of section 2, 3 and 4 of the GPL are valid under German copyright and contract law. Here is the German text of the judgment; an English translation will be available soon. The judgment comes at the right time to fight those (SCO and others) who challenge the legal validity of the GPL in Europe and elsewhere. The lawyer of the plaintiffs, Till Jaeger from Munich should be granted the Free Software Award."
Please note that the German copyright law (Urheberrecht, as it is called) is quite different from the US copyright.
Rough translation pasted from my Groklaw posting,
/ralph -- that is all of the heise article!
sorry for the messed up formating:
The open source project netfilter/iptables has won a huge success in the legal
battle against the router manufacturer Sitecom: With the decision of May 19,
2004 (Az. 21 O 6123/03) the Landgericht München [something like a district
court? R.] has confirmed the temporary injuction. Acording to this the
manufacturer Sitecom is prohibited to sell its WLAN routers until further
notice. Also the comparatively high amount of the dispute of Euro 100000 was
confirmed in the decision.
In the written opinion which was published on friday, it is clearly stated that
the judge considers the GPL valid for principal reasons. It says: "The
chamber shares the opionion that the conditions of the GPL can under no
circumstances be seen as an abandonment of copyrights and legal positions linked
to copyright." The sueing developer was legitimized to demand the rights
linked to the sourcecode
This makes it finally clear that the GPL model also works according to
German law", rejoiced Lawyer Till Jaeger, who represents the
netfilter/iptables project, in an interview with heise online. After this
"probably worldwide first decision on the validity and enforcability"
it was assured that the open source community defends itself. On the other hand
the Court has made it clear, that nobody has anything to fear if he plays by the
rules of the GPL
It is unknown if the router manufacturer plans furter legal steps. Jaeger's
client in the mean time found out that Sitecom offers one additional router
model (WL-111) with a firmware that infringes the GPL. A fine of 10000 Euro
because of infringement against the temporary injunction has already been
demanded, declared Jaeger
Truly a reason to rejoice, for Jaeger and for us!
BTW, IANAL.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Are violators of the GPL going to have to pay fines or be forced to open source the code they designed in conjunction with GPL'd code
They are going to have to stop infringing, just like today. This means removing the infringing code from, or GPLing, the product. There's a choice.
Of course, repeated willful infringment can and should definitely lead to fines.
IANAL
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Microsoft speaks against the GPL for this very reason - now the developers must reveal their source code, because it was based on GPL'ed code. But what they conveniently neglect to mention is that according to the EULA, a Windows developer cannot distribute, or even build, a derivative of Windows, under any terms . The license for GPL code covers only distribution of derivative products, whereas the MS EULA covers merely using the product. In fact, to even view the source code for an MS product requires that a developer agree to never develop a competing product!
Merely posting the source will allow these guys to continue to ship their product, but if they'd chosen the Microsoft development model, they'd owe royalties for every single product shipped!
Even though these guys might not like divulging their source code, they are still in a much better position than had they used Microsoft's code as a basis for their product.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Pretty much all of mainland Europe follows the civil law tradition. Generally, only those countries having roots in the British Empire follow the common law tradition. The state of Louisiana still carries some remaining vestiges of the civil law tradition, which it inherits via its history as a French territory.
Yes, you are entitled to the source code, and it is available from their site.
You can also redistribute it. Make sure you remove all the copyrighted material such as the SuSE logos and the installation program and help files, however. And make sure you remove any and all non-GPL stuff that you don't have a right to redistribute, such as Acrobat or any other such included programs. And you better recompile everything from scratch so you are sure their is nothing in the binaries that you don't have rights to redistribute. There are probably a lot of other rules, too.
Completely wrong. I suggest you read the GPL. There's no clause even suggesting that you can't distribute non-GPL code on the same CD. In fact, a large amount of code that comes with nearly every single Linux distribution is non-GPL. Apache httpd, PHP, X11, Perl, Python, etc. Most of those are GPL-compatible, but they certainly aren't GPL. The only time that the GPL affects other code is if it's linked to the GPL code, such as a static library or module.
Karma: Contrapositive
All it means is they are guilty of Copyright Violation, and would have to pay damages based on that (which, depending on how long it's been in there could be fairly significant).
Going forward they would have to either remove the offending code from their products, comply with the GPL, or risk facing another Copyright Infringement case.
Yes, Germany has a codified law system, so individual decisions of judges don't have the same impact on future decisions. That being said, though, most judges use decisions made by higher courts into account.
This decisions was made by a fairly low level court, so it might be of interest to other judges, but doesn't really set a precendent.
The basic way this works:
-Decisions by the constitutional court are binding for all German judges
-Decisions by the 7 federal courts are not binding due to article 97 of the German constituion that states that judges are only bound by law, not by precendent or any other means. But for all intents and purposes, they are setting precedent simply because any conflicting ruling would almost definitely struck down on appeal. These are not like Federal Circuit Courts in the US, though. With the exception of the BGH, they are specialized courts like the Federal Labor Court, the Patent Court, the Financial Court, and so on.
-Decisions by the 20 Oberlandesgerichte (one per state) are usually followed by lower courts for pretty much the same reasons. The Oberlandesgerichte or OLG are very similar to fedral circuit courts in the US.
-Decisions by any court lower than the OLGs and the state constitutional courts are maybe getting looked at by other judges, but don't have a huge influence on further decisions one way or the other.
This still doesn't get around the fact that, if what you're distributing classifies as 'derived work', then you're caught by the GPL.
Note that the GPL can, in some cases, call on you to distribute the source code to something that -- standing by itself -- would not constitute derived code. An example might be embeded device manufacturers. Even though a Linux module, distributed on it's own, might not classify as a derivative work triggering the GPL, the entire OS, distributed as part of the device and including the seme modules could concievably classify as a derivative work, and thus require the release of the entire source (including the otherwise standalone module) to classify as GPL compliant.
As fir wgat classifies as a reasonable charge for distributing the source code, It's not going to be a big deal until the difference between what you consider unreasonable and what I consider unreasonable is less than what it would cost me to file suit and get an injunction against you (even if I do it self-represented).
If you're that far off of what most people would consider a reasonable price, chances are you're going to know.
If I thought you were way too high, but still less expensive than hiring a lawyer, chances are that I'd just get some friends to pool together the cost of a single copy and then put it up on my website and advertise it. Bandwidth is usually a cheaper revenge than legal fees.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.