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.

Re:Stupid stupid article

[El Cubano]

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

No kidding. Check this out (from vmscan.c in the Linux kernel):

/*
* 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.
*/

Any doubts about whose the copyright is?

Re:Stupid stupid article

[sharkey]

Any doubts about whose the copyright is?

SCO's?

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.

The GPL is clear enough - beware not to spread FUD

[Pope Raymond Lama]

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.