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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."
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...
He has been enforcing GPL for over a year now with impressive results.
This guy does not know what he is talking about.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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)