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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."
Wouldent this be covered under Derivative Works as the author "derives" the finished product from a copyrighted work? I am way way not a lawyer, IANAL.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Also witness the recent problems with mozilla re-licensing. Every contributor had to agree to the relicensing or the code they contributed had to be rewritten when they couldn't be found (and there were a few).
That's why, in the FA, the organizer of GPL-Violations is able to enforce the GPL on the kernel. He is one of the thousands of contributors.
These things are an entity of greed, something in which the GPL was not founded. IMHO the GPL is an agreement between the user and the developer to maintain the inegrity of the code, and to further its existence and usefulness. This, by nature, is in effect the opposite of that which defines conventional means of protecting ideas and property.
Developing open source software for public use is not something attributed to those who would benefit from doing so arbitrarily, it is something attributed to those who would better the world around them no matter what they are doing.
The true meaning behind the division we see is far deeper than what can and cannot be enforceable. The problem we are facing has resolution in the re-thinking of laws and governing institutions over our daily lives. The GPL is not something which can be negotiated or changed to make the individual able to wave in the air in a courtroom, it is a doctrine to which can be added for the need of expanding an idealistic medium of communication between the individual and the masses.
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
Scenario:
EoSCo (Evil or Stupid Company) copies GPL'ed code from SRP (Some Random Project) and delivers in in binary-only form.
RI (Random Investigator) finds fingerprints of SRP in the binary and tells the workd.
JRC ( J. Random Coder,) a contributor to SRP, notices RI's blog entry and sends a letter to EoSCo: "You are violating my copyright. Please stop."
EoSCo ignores Letter.
JRC Sues EoSCo for copyright violation.
Judge: Do you have a license from JRC to copy this stuff?
EoSCo: Your Honor, we thought it belonged to FSF
Judge: So you have a license from FSF?
EoSCo: well no...
Judge: You have violated JRC's Copyright. Cease using this code at once and pay damages.
Note: each contributor to SRP owns his own copyrights, unless he assigns them to the SRP. Thus, EoSCO is vulnerable to each of the contributors. It only takes one single contributor to kill EoSCo's illegal product.
The First4Internet CD copy protection technology destroys the registry keys (driver device names) associated with your CD-ROM devices. Then a monitoring app allows or disallows access to the device.
The monitoring app is buggy. If it stops running or loses your device references, you will have to reinstall windows to make your CD-ROM devices work again.
Also, by messing with the internal driver properties like this, many apps simply hang or crash the system when trying to access the device.
You can forget about using your legitimate buring software after putting one of those CDs in your computer...
-- anon DRM developer
On the other hand, the GPL is just clear enough, that anyone reading it knows when he is in wrong doing.
That is why there are so few trials involving the GPL in court: violators tend to make agreements before it even gets there.
It happened just last month around here: on a list I subscribe too tehre are some lawyers who suypport Free Software. One of the members of the list noted that one program a large internet provider offered for free (beer) download for its subscribers was actually a renamed and closed GPLed Software. We on the list had the same doubt as the article proposes: in name of whom should we send a letter to the violators? The developers of said program were all from abroad - they might not even get interested in getting involved. Moreover, for the local lawyers to be able to legaly represent the foreigner developers, there would be quite a lot of bureaucratic entanglements.
So, on the list, we decided just to send a lawyer letter pointing that their software was violating the GPL - said lawyer was representing no one in particular. Ok, it took some phone calls besides the letter, but in no much time, they complied and released the source code for downloading, as required by the license.
So, IMHO, IANAL, ETC, even when a case actually gets into trial, a single developer, with no more than a few dozen lines of code, involved in the proccess is more than enough for the wrongdoing to get characterized.
-><- no
greedy leech asses
Well, which are the greedy ones? The musicians who decide to sell music, or their so-called fans who want it without paying the artists?
The only "greed" in that picture is on the part of the people that know the musician has chosen to sell their work, and yet (while claiming to like the performer, apparently) decide they want it on their own terms (i.e., "free"), instead. Turning the musician into your pet entertainment slave is greedy. Choosing to sell your music (which may indeed result in no one thinking you're worth the trouble to spend $15) is a business venture. "Ripping" off that business (such an appropriate term) is just what it sounds like.
Make music people are willing to pay for
Hmmm. So, if musicians do not make music that [more, non-14-yeard-olds, presumably?] people are willing to pay for, how does that legitimize ripping off what they do make? This is the part I'm always a little foggy on. If someone doesn't like the music enough to buy it, why are they willing to rip it off? If they hate the music, why do they want it? If they like the musician, why aren't they willing to enter into the same transaction that they muscian has said they want to enter into? And if you think the artist is a jerk for working within the larger, traditional music industry framework, why would you none the less want the music made by that person? I've never quite been able to put myself into the shoes of the person that says either:
"I hate this guy because he charges for his music, so I'm going to rip off a copy and enjoy it!"
or
"I love this musician so much! Every time he comes out with a new recording I must show my admiration by getting a copy. It's just that I don't love him enough to actually do what he's asking and pay him for entertaining me. Too bad for him! Sucker! But I love him and his music!"
The FSF owns (a) the licence, and (b) all code assigned to it. (This is why they do strongly suggest assigning rights to it, to avoid any lack of understanding or willful stupidity on the part of lawyers or corporate execs.)
Any individual programmer owns all GPLed code that they write, provided they have not assigned the rights to the FSF.
Personally, I don't see the problem. Well, actually, I do. The problem is that a lot of lawyers get paid to find problems and create them when they aren't there to be found.
The French only pay doctors when people are well, which means that doctors there do a great deal to prevent illness, rather than profit off it. Maybe US corporate lawyers should be paid on a similar basis - by how many legal tangles they DON'T get into, which seems a better indicator of when they are doing their job.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One problem. What if someone else releases a derivative work under the GPL. That person makes a comment copyrighting the code. Then an evil third-party comes along and violates GPL by using some of the code. The code is in both versions, which are copyrighted by the GPL, so whose code is it? It looks obvious, that the first author does, but what if there aren't comments on every single line saying who write what? It might be impossible to find where each part of the code started. Even if you did know who wrote each line, how would the ownership of the code be split up?
1) The GPL *CANNOT* do anything about who the author is. You have to put copyright notices on the work, true, but this is Berne Convention level stuff; it has nothing to do with the GPL. The GPL is a license the author(s) use(s) to license their work to the public. If the author(s) so choose, they can put the work under multiple licenses (e.g. also allow proprietary commercial exploitation for a licensing fee), but it's pretty damn clear that the author of the work is governed by copyright law; NOT by what license(s) they license their work with.
2) Derivative works work exactly the same way--they're something for copyright law to concern itself with, not for a license to define.
3) Most of the time, ANYONE with standing can bring a copyright action. What does this mean? I don't have to be the author of the entire work, but if I have rights to ANY part of it, I can sue them for breech of the GPL if I have an enforcable copyright on a piece of the copyrighted work. I can join with others so that we all together sue them for breech, etc. But the catch is that we can only sue them for breech with respect to those parts we actually have copyrights on, not over the whole work, so they could try to weasel out by getting rid of the parts we wrote (if that was feasible). Of course, the flip side of this is that statutory damages can become a real bitch if suddenly you face N different actions from all N developers, separately, well, this being Slashdot, just picture a Beowulf cluster of lawsuits...
4) The GPL has been enforced. It continues to be enforced. Most of the time it doesn't add "extra" details (like a preferred venue), that's quite deliberate. It's meant to operate under any Berne Convention signitory (e.g. most anywhere that recognizes copyrights), not any particular locale. Jurisdiction being what it is in the Inernet age, you can sue damn near anyone in any Internet-connected venue these days if they have even minimal contacts there (a stock example is the mention of that US citizen suing US citizen with US website hosted in the US under the stricter British libel law because the web page could be read in Britain and it therefore would affect the plaintiff's reputation in Britain). In other words, whoever sues first gets to pick the venue, most likely, unless there are compelling enough reasons for the judge to punt the case elsewhere.
DISCLAIMER:
I am not a lawyer. I certainly don't know international law. I have, however, read lots of things written by people who were lawyers. I suggest you talk to one of them if you actually need legal advice of some sort, because I cannot give legal advice, I cannot represent you, and I cannot and do not wish to create any manner of attourney-client priviledge between or among any of us. These opinions are my own, and may not reflect those of my employer(s). Please correct any point of this which is mistaken by providing contrary evidence for examination. The copyright on this post is disclaimed and this post is placed into the public domain by me, the unnamed author. If you think this disclaimer excessive, you haven't read some of the wackier legal reasoning I have in cases that, in my opinion, should never rightfully be used for precident of any kind.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I've seen too much anti-F/OSS articles lately to consider it a mere coincidence.
/. , i've seen articles along the same tune on different (and not so linux-friendly) sites, too.
This "GPL may be valid, but it's unenforceable" today, the one with "the corporations are just using our ideals in order to make money" yesterday, and a series of "windows servers are cheaper, easier to patch and just as popular as *nix servers" articles last week. And all this just on
This means "they" are getting desperate.
This means "they" admit they're losing and that we win.
On the other hand, this also means we'll see more and more of this kind of garbage in the future.
Is this some new kind new kind of troll
It's a new kind of troll. Apparently, someone wrote a bot that will scrub the highest rated comments from one story, and post them into another randomly chosen story.
To what end, the mind boggles. But there you go.
I suppose you could argue that you have the ownership of the original post, and so it can't be reposted without your permission; but that would be much harder to enforce with posts that are originally made by an AC, and it would be hard to stop even if you could demonstrate that you originally wrote the original content.
What people do with too much time on their hands is pretty amazing, really. It's all I can to read slashdot, let alone write bots to vandalize it.
--
$tar -xvf
Shouldn't this be filed under "It's Funny, Laugh" rather than "Your Rights Online"? Seems more like slapstick than much of anything else. How many times does it have to be said: you don't enforce the GPL, you enforce COPYRIGHT! The GPL (like "fair use") is a defense! You don't "enforce" a defense, you raise it - if you can.
Well,
...
/*
the dutch law professor is likely wrong as a lot of ppl have pointed out.
But, I cant resist to nitpick on your example
* linux/mm/vmscan.c
*
* Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 Linus Torvalds
*
* Swap reorganised 29.12.95, Stephen Tweedie.
* kswapd added: 7.1.96 sct
* Removed kswapd_ctl limits, and swap out as many pages as needed
* to bring the system back to freepages.high: 2.4.97, Rik van Riel.
* Zone aware kswapd started 02/00, Kanoj Sarcar (kanoj@sgi.com).
* Multiqueue VM started 5.8.00, Rik van Riel.
*/
The notice in this comment says the original copyright is Linus Torwalds.
However the actual "authorship" and in a lot of countries the "copyright" is now:
Linus Torwalds, Stephen Tweedie, a guy with abreviated name sct, Rik van Riel and Kanojo Sarcar.
And yes, I'm pretty sure a lot of ppl would think ONLY Linus Torwald would be copyright holder, so yes, there are ppl who would have doubt.
Especially: in USA law, very likely only Linus Torvalds would be recogniced as copyright holder and in european law all the authors above would be recogniced as copyright holders.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.