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GPL Successfully Defended in German Court
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."
So is it now legally binding in Germany?
What does this say about propietry software's licenses?
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
I don't get it..
Why were they barred from distributing the product?
Or was there some reason that they could not also just distribute the source, which would have also made them compliant with the GPL?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Since the GPL is based on well established copyright and contract law, in most nations it shouldn't really need to be "tested" in court. IANAL, but I would think that it would have a far stronger legal standing than EULAs which often make the people who agree to them take all sorts of measures that have nothing to do with traditional copyright protection.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
We expect people to agree to our Terms of Use but we don't have to obey those from others when we use their products.
How hypocritical!
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That's interesting. I recently purchased a range of Gigabit network cards. An Intel Pro/1000, an Blekin and a D-Link. The D-Link box contained a printed copy of the GPL. So they clearly do consider the GPL binding, otherwise why would they have bothered? This is the first time I have ever seen a printed GPL included with a product.
I havn't checked the driver CDs in the Intel & Belkin cards yet to see if they have Linux drivers on them. While I'm at it, also shame on Intel for not mentioning Linux on the box; Novell & Windows logos are there, but nothing for Linux (The Belkin & D-Link boxes do not mention any OS compatability at all)
without seeking damages.. GPL has no teeth. more of a, "lets infringe and see, whats the worst that could happen" attitude. asside from that it COSTS money to goto court in the fist place. If the RIAA didnt seek damages would anyone have stopped Kazaing?
They preferred not to but rather to cease and desist. It's their decicion, not yours.
Who knows what other corpses they had in the cellar (to use a german proverb)?
"if the GPL is valid and a company has released a product contaminated with GPL code, shouldn't they have to release the source rather than simply refraining from the practise?"
This is the viral nature of GPL. I suspect from now on, D-Link will move over to one of the BSD's, probably FreeBSD. The viral aspect of GPL is what I suspect keeps many companies from going full Linux. At least when you make a deal with the Devil, i.e. Microsoft, and MS allows you to modify one of their Windoze kernels for a hardware device, you have the comfort of knowing that your competitors will not use the GPL to try and get their grubby little fingers on the code that you paid huge sums of money to your developers for free.
I've got a Belkin F5D8230-4 MIMO wireless router and the matching F5D8010 cards. Airgo makes the chipset on both. Guess what the router's internal OS is? Guess which OS doesn't have driver support from Belkin/Airgo for the card? I know--this is probably off-topic, as Airgo does release some parts of the router's bits and pieces to the public. That being said, however, to me it's like a violation of the spirit of the GPL to make use of the GPL'd OS to make your product a success, then turn around and very pointedly ignore the support needs of the folks whose code you depended on to get your product off the ground (and Belkin wireless pre-N stuff is exceedingly popular now, as even a casual scan of the Wireless Aisle at the Usual Retail Outlets will confirm). Reading the forums, there's a lot of Linux folks out there who'd love to have a bona fide driver available from the OEM. Probobably a few of whom have contributed code to the OS at one point or another which Belkin/Airgo is dependent on.
At least you can get the card to work via the NDIS kludge (but not in every case, and not even using Belkin's Win32 drivers). I guess I shouldn't complain. WinXP-64 campers are completely out in the cold with this kit, so my partner won't be able to upgrade her Win2K any time soon.
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The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
Copyright by itself is viral. If you modify someone elses Work of Art (i.e. creating your own work based on the original), you need her permission. To distribute it you need her permission again. And to distribute it for modification, you have to ask for permission again and again. Same is valid for the modificaton of the modification. This is viral by nature. The GPL just gives you all three permissions at once, but it doesn't change the virality.
In fact the same is valid for the BSD licence. The original copyright holder has to be mentioned in all derived works, and also in the derivations of the derivations. In this case the virality is attached to another aspect, but it is still viral.
...that your perceptions are maybe the result of different groups of people comprising the slashdot community? I've found that my own opinions on certain subjects are in a minority, while on other subjects they seem to be in the majority. I've even witnessed that on certain topics, moderation of certain viewpoints that you think would be related, turn out differently depending on the topic. I suspect this is due to many people, like myself for example, who just don't read certain topics, while reading other topics faithfully.
I myself have a very low opinion of those who think they have a right to copy whatever they want because "information wants to be free". I see such people as manufacturing reasons to justify their own shoddy behavior. OTOH, I have a very high opinion of the GPL(and other open source licenses) and those who defend them.
Just keep that in mind.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
You're incredibly naive if you think an unmodified Linux kernel is capable of running an embedded device like that....
In other words, it *is* like it's something they wrote. They stood on the shoulders of others, but they still had to do their own work to get it to work with their hardware and do what they want it to do. Seeing as they use off the shelf wireless chipsets, ethernet controllers, and such, there's absolutely nothing to stop a competitor from using the source code they would have to release under the GPL to manufacture a cheaper alternative that is functionally identical. It makes much better fiscal sense for them to switch to a different kernel and modify their own source to suit it.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Conversely, there was nothing stopping them from just grabbing Linksys' WRT source code, or OpenWRT, or any of the other Free Software firmwares and running it on their router. Then they'd become that "cheaper alternative!"
Besides, that's exactly how the GPL is supposed to work, and DLink knew the rules of the game before they started playing.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Many people (apparently even those in charge of large companies) seem to have this very strange idea that the GPL is not valid, and that because of this they can do whatever they want with the work in question. The premise doesn't have any basis in reality, but the conclusion is sheer insanity. It's somewhat akin to walking into a liquor store, noticing that their liquor license has recently expired and then stealing on their booze, claiming that because it can't legally be sold it must be free. The GPL's validity as a license has nothing to do with copyright law, and those people who have licensed their work under the GPL have explicitly NOT placed their work in the public domain. Hell, D-Link doesn't have (to my knowledge) a publically availible license for their proprietary code at all! That must mean it's public domain, right?
As much as I'd like to see a legal test of the GPL (not because I think it's invalid, but because coporations will become much more willing to deal with it, once it's been proven in court), this is simply a very, very basic test of copyright law. It's amazingly basic, but apparently some people still don't get it: D-Link doesn't think the GPL is a valid contract? Fine, then they're not licensed to distribute the code at all!
IANAL..., But the person who gets to defend that right is the copyright holder, not you (the poor victim who depended upon the terms of the GPL.) If the copyright holder takes them to court, and accepts "court costs + stopping distribution", then that is it. I don't see what standing you would have to sue since it wasn't your copyright that was violated...
The quintessential example is GNU Readline. GNU Readline is a library that is deliberately licensed under the GPL (not the LGPL) in order to "encourage" people to GPL the rest of their software if they need use of it. Basically, linking the Readline library into your application and distributing it requires you to GPL your entire application, even though merely linking to an unmodified library could hardly be called deriving the work from it.
This aspect of linking which requires relicensing is what makes GPL detractors claim the GPL is "viral". Merely placing GPL'd code in the same process space as a non-GPL'd program requires the non-GPL'd program to "catch" the GPL (if the author want's to distribute it).
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