GPL Successfully Defended in German Court

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday September 23, 2006 @05:32AM from the penguin-shoots-penguins-scores dept.

Philip Bailey writes "The GPL Violations Project, based in Germany, have won (subject to appeal) a court case against D-Link, who had allegedly distributed parts of the Linux kernel in a product in a way which contravened the GPL. D-Link had claimed that the GPL was not 'legally binding' but have now agreed to cease and desist, and refrain from distributing the infringing product, a network attached storage device. Expenses, including legal expenses, were received by the plaintiffs; they did not request any damages, consistent with their policy. They have previously won a number of out of court settlements against other companies. Slashdot has previously mentioned the GPL Violations Project."

1 of 210 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Legally binding? by caseih · 2006-09-23 06:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

Right. This is about software distribution, not software use by an end-user. The GPL is *not* an EULA; it's a license to distribute the program. The GPL explicitly states that you do not have to agree to the terms of the GPL in order to use the program.

I suppose that by these same arguments you could argue that EULA's must be valid because nothing else grants you the right to use copyrighted materials when you buy a program from a closed-source vendor. But EULAs go beyond copyrights into contract law, I believe they are a different beast than source code licensing.