GPL Hard to Enforce?

the-dark-kangaroo writes "The GPL may be difficult to enforce due to a lack of clarity over who owns the copyright to the software, according to a legal expert. Lucie Guibault, an assistant professor of intellectual-property law at the Institute for Information Law in Amsterdam, said at the Holland Open Software Conference in Amsterdam, that the GPL should clarify who is the author of the software to ensure that open source software distributed under this licence receives legal protection."

Comments

Stupid stupid article

[interiot]

The copyright of the actual text of the GPL is owned by the Free Software Foundation, but the author owns the copyright to the GPL-licensed software. Authors that wish to release their software under the GPL are advised to include a line in the source code stating "Copyright © [name of author]".

If the author of GPL-licensed product discovers that a company has not adhered to the terms and conditions of the free software licence, the individual may find it difficult to argue his case in court as the defending party could argue that the copyright appears to belong to the Free Software Foundation, according to Guibault.

"The only name that appears on the licence is the Free Software Foundation -- they appear to be the licensor," she said.

Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.

Sigh, more morons reported on Slashdot

[QuantumG]

Everytime random lawyer X says something about Open Source without doing a trivial amount of fact checking it gets reported on Slashdot. Braindead news. If Lucie Guibault, assistant professor of intellectual-property law at the Institute for Information Law in Amsterdam had bothered to go read "How to use the GPL or LGPL" she would have noted that the way to use the GPL is to state ON YOUR SOURCE CODE that it is copyright to you and that it is released under the TERMS OF THE GPL. Obviously if you don't do this you're not releasing your source code under the GPL, but in that case you're giving your source code out under NO LICENSE which means that others have NO RIGHTS to reuse the code.

Then to point out the even greater boneheadedness of this story, let's say that EvilMegaCorp went to court and said "oh, we didn't think you owned this copyright, we thought the FSF did" and the judge agreed, the FSF would be in court the next day saying "no, we didn't write it, we wrote the license, but if you'd like to name us as the author of the software we'll gladly defend the copyright on it."

So STFU and get back to teaching students how to swindle.