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GPL Gets Its Day in Court in Israel

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the never-fun-to-break-new-legal-ground dept.

MadFarmAnimalz writes "In what appears to be the first court test for the GPL in the Middle East, Alexander Maryanovsky, the author of the GPL licensed Jin Chess Client is taking IchessU to court for violations of the GPL license."

14 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Right.... bit of clarification by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is an open source chess client called JIN licensed under the GPL.
    This is an executable and front end chess client.

    This has been extended by iChessU to support a closed source DLL which adds new functionality (notably video streaming between players).

    The source code to the Expanded client is available and providing you have the closed source binary DLL, you can run the newly compiled program.

    Isn't this like me releasing a GPL program which is linked to the nvidia or ATI blobs?

    Hell, isn't it similar if I write a GPL application which uses the Windows API?

    I personally feel as though this is an overreaction, the ichessu site does not hide the fact its based on JIN and offers sources, or am I wrong and this is infact a genuine GPL violation?

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
    1. Re:Right.... bit of clarification by TERdON · · Score: 4, Insightful

      GNU about the GPL: "This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License."

      And in the license itself: "For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable."

      IMHO, that means Windows API = ok, Java API = ok, .NET API = ok, own API or library = not okay.

      And that makes sense. Otherwise I could just build all of my app in my "MainApp API" and GPL my "StartMainApp()" function call... :)

      --
      I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
    2. Re:Right.... bit of clarification by bloodredsun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nope.

      Only part of the client source code is downloadable, not the whole; this is a violation of the GPL. Also, the iChessU has an EULA which violates the GPL by placing new restrictions on how the code may be used.

      The bad faith negotations accusation may be an overreaction but it's hard not to think this when iChessU initially wanted to license JIN but backed out when it appeared too expensive for them and then proceeded to use it anyway.

      This is not an overreaction but a devloper fighting to prevent a third party assuming legal control of that developers work.

    3. Re:Right.... bit of clarification by bWareiWare.co.uk · · Score: 4, Informative

      The nVidia blobs and kernel stub are not GPL. The GPL Linux kernel contains no code for accessing the NVIDIA blobs.

      The process of installing the nVidia Kernel stub combines GPL and non-GPL code and compiles it on your machine. The resulting binary is NOT re-distributable under any licence. This is why Linux distributions do not come with the nVidia and ATI drivers built in, but you must install them separately.

      This workaround works because the GPL only comes into effect when you copy a program not when you use it, as long as you are not copying (i.e. redistributing) the results you are not bound by its terms.

      iChessU could use the same trick. Download the standard JIN source, download the iChessU patch and binary and compile them yourself - noone is copying the result, so the GPL is not violated. Though the resulting program contains GPL and non-GPL code and so can never be copied under any licence.

    4. Re:Right.... bit of clarification by jrumney · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're misunderstanding the terms of the GPL as they relate to various linking technologies. There are many armchair lawyers on slashdot who like to claim that the GPL only applies to static linking, or that using TCP sockets gets around it etc. But the GPL does not contain any mention of linking technologies or what is and isn't covered, it just talks about "derived works", which is up to the courts to define. In a case where the defendant approached the plaintif about licensing their work commercially then suddenly changed their mind and wrote some dynamic linking or socket based code specifically to "get around" the GPL, I would expect the court to side with the plaintif, since the defendant has shown that they understood from the start that what they wanted to do was not allowed under the GPL, and their intention is plainly to try to circumvent copyright law through technicalities, which the judge is unlikely to approve of.

    5. Re:Right.... bit of clarification by SashaM · · Score: 4, Informative

      I personally feel as though this is an overreaction, the ichessu site does not hide the fact its based on JIN and offers sources, or am I wrong and this is infact a genuine GPL violation?

      Actually, there are several violations:

      1. IChessU's released source code does not compile, so it can't possibly be considered the "complete corresponding source code", regardless of the status of the audio/video library (which to the best of my understanding of the GPL is also covered by it).
      2. IChessU do not release their application under the GPL, but instead under a horrendous EULA. Read it, really.
      3. Although they do mention Jin, they don't mention my copyright. Instead it's "Copyright (C) [2006] [unknown]", as if they don't know whose copyright Jin is.
      Alexander (aka Sasha) Maryanovsky.
  2. No it's not by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Isn't this like me releasing a GPL program which is linked to the nvidia or ATI blobs?It isn't, because ATI and NVidia do not link to the kernel. The portions of the NVidia and ATi driver that *do* link directly to the kernel (also known as the "kernel stub"), are indeed GPL. What happns, is the closed source X driver communicates to and from the stub indirectly, not via linking.

    It's actually just a different DRM/DRI implementation, which nearly all X drivers use nowadays.

    Note in this case DRM does not mean "Digital Rights management", it means "Direct Rendering Manager"

  3. Re:In a way, this is very lucky timing for GPLv3 by Watson+Ladd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why are laws written in english anyway? English is ambiguous, and that's a bad thing. Why not some formal law language with clear semantics and syntax?

    --
    Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
  4. Re:In a way, this is very lucky timing for GPLv3 by russ1337 · · Score: 4, Funny

    We ocasionally need management to understand it.... (it should be written in colours and cartoon pictures of small animals..)

  5. Doesn't matter by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Pipes, temp files, sockets, none of these are covered by the GPL. The GPL covers explicitly *linking only*. If a GPL'ed piece of software could not communicate with a closed source piece of software over a socket or pipe, the Apache web server would not exist.

    To be specific - I am pretty sure the drivers use either a UNIX socket or a named pipe.

  6. Re:In a way, this is very lucky timing for GPLv3 by kripkenstein · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why are laws written in english anyway? English is ambiguous, and that's a bad thing. Why not some formal law language with clear semantics and syntax?

    There are very good reasons why this is impossible. Actually, what you are proposing is a very natural notion, that sadly turns out to be wrong. I say 'natural', because during the first third or so of the 20th century, philosophy (of language, in particular), was seeking exactly what you are driving at - a 'pure' language, free from ambiguity. This would have had benefits for legal matters, as well as philosophical ones, and even metamathematical implications. But this was shown to be a futile attempt (Wittgenstein being the major figure showing this). I'll briefly summarize why this is so.

    First, when you refer to human-related things - as laws are, they mention e.g. 'assault', 'homicide', and so forth - there is no way to 'clean up' the language. It cannot be made unambiguous, because the underlying concepts are ambiguous. Try to define (as the famous example goes) 'game'. For any suggested definition, there are counterexamples (e.g. not all games are about winning or losing, not all games have scores, not all games are fun, etc. etc.). This is a simple consequence of the fact that life is complex - we use the word 'game' in many contexts, in many ways. Unlike in math, where we start with definitions, in the law we start with pre-existing human concepts and try to work with them. We therefore cannot arrive at unambiguous statements.

    Second, and this is a more subtle issue, language is meaningless without a context of use. By this I mean, that if you see some scribbles on a page, they are worthless without someone to read them. A sentence + a reader are what is necessary for 'meaning' to exist. Thus, even if we write what we believe to be unambiguous text, we can never remove the element of the reader: for us, the statement is unambiguous, but for another person, with a slightly different mindset, it may not be so. You may claim that your interpretation is 'correct', but that will not avail you when a matter is put before the public, i.e. open to interpretation by many people, as the law must be.

    Sorry to go on at length, but this is a fascinating topic for me.

  7. Further information by kripkenstein · · Score: 4, Informative

    I happen to know Hebrew. Some more information from the Hebrew documents is the matter of money; the Jin programmer is requesting 20,000 NIS (about $4500) as 'damages' (for the violations made so far). This is perhaps an initial offer for settlement. Note how the $4500 is just higher than the $4000 he initially wanted from them (which seemed more than fair to me, personally).

    In the lawsuit, it is mentioned that in Israeli law (which I cannot confirm or deny, I have no idea) the minimal fine possible for this type of offense is 10,000 NIS (about $2250).

    I can translate other parts of the Hebrew documents if anyone is interested.

  8. Better Jin link (I'm the author) by SashaM · · Score: 4, Informative

    Although the content is currently the same, the real URL of my Jin website is http://www.jinchess.com (could an editor please fix it - I think it can handle the residual slashdotting). I'll now get back to reading everyone's comments and reply where I can :-)

  9. Re:GPL doesn't need to be tested. by FooBarWidget · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Actually it does. Or can you merge GPL code and non-GPL code in a single codebase? This is a restriction of how you can use the code you obtained through the GPL license.

    That is not a restriction that GPL adds: you never were allowed to do that in the first place. Suppose the code is not under any license, then standard copyright law applies. And copyright law does not let you copy that code to your code AT ALL.