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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
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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.
We'll see what is enforceable and what isn't when these big companies that are dumping money in to open source development feel like they have something to protect from each other.
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
They own the copyright to their patches, but not to the thing they're patching. Just like the renter of an apartment owns the microwave oven they bought, but not the apartment they put it in.
He has been enforcing GPL for over a year now with impressive results.
This guy does not know what he is talking about.
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.
This is why contributors to GNU software are expected to assign copyright to the FSF.
This issue has been addressed, and the FSF has shown one way to handle it properly. There's nothing to see here.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
This isn't a real problem. The basic issue is that only the copyright holder has standing to litigate copyright violations. But it's never really ambiguous who the copyright holder is. The FSF recommends that free software developers assign their copyrights to the FSF, so that they can deal with violations. Many individual projects require all contributors to assign their copyrights to a consortium, to the project leader, or something similar. There are some projects with copyright held jointly by many developers, but there's almost always someone who you can point to and say "this person/organization holds copyright over the majority of the code". And even if it's not immediately obvious from the license who the copyright holder is, that doesn't matter in court; not knowing who has standing to prosecute is no defense.
Also, notice that "Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the author of the GPL, was unable to comment in time for this article." A brief interview with RMS would surely have cleared this up as a non-issue.
You mean, all those messages I sprinkle in my programs that say "Copyright 2005 Eric Smith" don't give them a hint?
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Its pretty easy to tell who owns copyright in any open source project. Most open source projects come with a tar.gz released archive containing one or more of the following files: README, INFO, CREDITS, AUTHORS, COPYING, etc... Any one of these files, in addition to the actual source code, shows clear evidence about who owns copyright in an open source project. Sometimes there is one person, sometimes more than one. The author of the article forgot to bring up these facts, and instead relies on spreading FUD.
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...
I have exclusive copyright for my work, unless I transfer it in a written "instrument of conveyance."
An infringer might claim that I have no standing, but could not possibly make that case as there is no instrument of conveyance, and I and FSF would both testify that I had not tranferred ownership.
Since when was uncertainty as to the owner a defence? If I rip off your bicycle (to use the stupid IP as physical property analogy), am I less guilty because I thought I was ripping off somebody else's?
This is pretty stupid. The author of a work is the copyright owner in perpetuity unless they assign ownership to someone else. If there are multiple authors then the authors as a group own the copyright. This is the way copyright has always worked.
A work is technically, and legally, copyright upon creation by the author. You don't have to register something with the US Copyright Office for it to be protected. The point of registering with the Copyright Office is to provide an official registration so that if you are legally challenged, it's likely the first person to register is the owner. But it's nothing more than a measure of protection.
If I create a work and you register the copyright in your name, the burden of proof falls to me to prove that I created it first. But if I can do that, then legally I'm protected and you are not.
So putting your name on it does nothing for it. If you want to protect it, go to the Copyright Office web site, download the form, fill it out, and send it in with you $30. That's the best protection you can have.
Yeah, google is a publicly owned company. Where are my shares, dammit?
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.
Seems like his 'enforcement' has relied on the good nature of the 'violators'.
A quick glance didnt point out any legal findings in real court, so its all just a lot of hot air.
The GPL doesnt stand up.
Lucky all these companies caved in then isn't it? I mean, you'd expect multiple companies to cave in to the demands to fight off the terrifying threat of an individual with a baseless case, right?
Just because it didn't make it to court doesn't mean the case is without merit. In fact quite the opposite. The GPL violators caving before court suggests that they figured there was a good chance they wouldn't win.
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
When the patch has been applied to the project he is legally one of the copyright holders of the project, unless he has assigned his copyright elsewhere.
Quote:
A quick perusal of any GPL'd software in the world would have shown how full of shit the guy was.
The cake is a pie
Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.
You have clearly never read a John Dvorak article.
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)
Joe Hacker's code is still copyright Joe Hacker. When did he assign away his copyright? Not by using the GPL. Of course, it might be hard for Joe Hacker to find out where is code has ended up ... but that's life on the
globe of corporate scumbags we call
Earth.
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.
There is no problem. Joe Hacker owns the copyright on the code he wrote, unless he signed it away. He did not give the copyright to Jack N. Box, so Jack N. Box's heirs do no have rights to that code. Those heirs do have rights to the code Jack N. Box wrote, which is only 10%. Company X can contact Jack N. Box's heirs for a different license, but they only have the right to that 10%. (And if they gave rights to everything they might be in trouble themselves for negotiating in bad faith since they sold rights they did not have)
There is no problem here, except that Company X has a really hard time changing the license. In general the point of the GPL is to make it hard to change the license to something else, so this is intentionall. In fact if company X goes to Joe Hacker and gets rights to his code, they may be unable to use it if Jack N. Box's heirs decide to not give those rights up. In short a tiny minority can hold the majority to not changing the license. (Again, this is by design)
Note that some people assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. The advantage of this is the FSF will sue to make sure code they own is not misused. This saves Joe Hacker the effort of finding a lawyer when needed. The disadvantage is in theory someone can gain control of the FSF and sell rights (or just make a new version of the GPL that gives everything away), and there is nothing Joe Hacker can do. Most projects using the GNU license choose to not require code be turned over to the FSF to protect against a rouge FSF sometime in the future.
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.
Yes, as a zillion high rated comment already point out, there is no legal doubt that the author own the code. And a "copyright year name" statement is not needed, but anyway encouraged and common (the article actually also state that).
However, the article is about damages, not ownership. If it is unclear to the defendant who the opposing legal party was, it may reduce the chance or size of damages awarded. At least in Holland. No question though, the defendant will be forced to stop the illegal distribution.
Stopping the illegal distribution is what is most important to us, but a lawyer is usually paid to extract as many money as possible, so his point of view is obviously different.
Getting a little stickier here: What happens if person C, who's working at a corporation, contributes to the code but he signed an over-reaching agreement with his corp about ownership of his work.
You're talking about a work-made-for-hire contract, I assume. C's employer owns the changes. C may not distribute the changes to the public unless and until C's employer distributes them to the public.