Slashdot Mirror
German Court Convicts Skype For Breaching GPL
terber writes "A German court has once again upheld the GPLv2 and convicted Skype (based in Luxembourg) of violating the GPL by selling the Linux-based VoIP phone 'SMCWSKP 100' without proper source code access. (Original is in German, link is a Google translation.) Skype later added a flyer to the phones' packaging giving a URL where the sources could be obtained; but the court found this insufficient and in breach of GPL section 3. The plaintiff was once again Netfilter developer Harald Welte, who runs gpl-violations.org. The decision is available in German at www.ifross.de (Google translation here)."
You said the GPL was violated in a post trying to explain why it's Copyright and not the GPL that was violated.
What do you mean? Opposing the RIAA means supporting the user's freedom. Enforcing the GPL also means supporting the user's freedom. There is no contradiction.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You *can* violate the terms of the GPL, if you do you lose your rights to distribute (since it is what gives you the rights). However you would not be convicted of doing so. Instead, you would be convicted of distributing without a license in violation of copyright (since you had no license to distribute). It's a technicality I know, but I wish more people would understand the specifics.
This is far from pedantry. Using terms suggesting that someone would be convicted or held liable for a "GPL violation" suggests that a court must uphold the GPL as valid for such a lawsuit to be successful. This makes people believe (erroneously) that the GPL is a questionable document that needs to be tested in court.
On the contrary, a standard legal action against someone not in compliance with the terms of the GPL would be a simple copyright infringement case; the onus is on the defendant to show that they had a valid license (and met its terms).
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Hey, we're having a legal discussion here -- pedantry is necessary!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In a perfect world, we wouldn't need the GPL, but we don't live in a perfect world. The GPL attempts to use the (imperfect) legal tools that do exist (read: copyright law) to accomplish its goal of access to source. The spirit behind it has little to do with copyright.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Are you talking about American courts or German Courts. Because each country interprets the GPL, and copyrights, in very different fashion. Heck, in china, they ignore you until for some minor reason, you piss them off. Then you are shot. I think that is one of the VERY few countries that do that (for that reason).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I assume you're talking about the benefit of copyleft (i.e., enforcing the sharing) versus plain permissive (e.g. Public Domain). The thing is, plain permissive really isn't all that much worse than copyleft. In contrast, (from the RIAA's perspective) public domain is very much worse than proprietary. So, having a longer copyleft term doesn't benefit the Free Software community nearly as much as having a longer copyright term benefits the RIAA.
Besides, old music remains valuable to society. For the most part, old code doesn't.
For both of those reasons, it is unnecessary for Free Software to have long copyright, and thus most Free Software advocates oppose copyright extensions. The fact that the RIAA et al. abuse copyright only confirms that position more.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You are mistaken. The only way that Open Source will die is if this type of thing doesn't happen. People like Harald are doing their best to uphold Open Source, as well as Free Software. If you want to allow corporations to fuck everyone else over and take without giving back, then you should really be looking at one of the BSD licenses.
"Holy shit, someone's actually enforcing GPL v2! Open Source is going to die!" is, excuse my language, but fucking retarded. Find something else to blow up about. I hear the sky is falling.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
The court must "test" the GPL if the defendant claims that he accepted the terms. At that point the judge will attempt to decide whether the defendant did indeed keep up his half of the bargain, potentially restricting the power of the GPL agreement where local laws say otherwise.
The GPL is a fairly air-tight design, but there's nothing erroneous about its need for court testing. A judge can (and will!) strike various parts of the agreement if he finds them to be in conflict with either the law or the intent of the agreement. As a result, it's difficult to legally "prove" that a given type of agreement will hold up in court unless either that same agreement or a similar agreement is tested. The GPL has had sufficient legal testing to show that it will hold up in court.
If I'm not mistaken, your confusion stems from section 5 of the GPL, which explicitly provides for the fact that no proof of an agreement takes place. According to the GPL, you don't have to accept it to use the software. It falls back on standard copyright law in that case. Thus when an infringer is identified, he faces a double-edged sword. Does he claim that he did not accept the GPL, in which case he's on the hook for copyright infringement? Or does he claim that he did indeed accept the terms of the GPL, in which case he's on the hook for (I'll phrase this carefully just to annoy the "contract vs. license" folks out there
The GPL is an interesting experiment in using a legal loophole as the foundation for a distribution agreement. This case provides further evidence that the concept works as well in practice as it does in legal theory.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I think the judge looked at the paragraph a bit further on in that section where it talks about providing access to the source as a download from a server, and noted that that case is explicitly allowed only when the software itself is also distributed as a download. That led him to the conclusion that clause B that you quote, when it talks of "medium customarily used for software interchange", means exactly what it says: an actual copy on some storage medium, logic being that if it allowed downloads from servers then it wouldn't have been neccesary later to explicitly allow downloads from servers. Combine that with failing to include the license text when the license says plainly in section 1 that you must include a copy of it's text and the judge's decision doesn't seem unreasonable.
And I know the issue of downloads of source has been discussed, and IIRC the FSF's position is that it's not acceptable on it's own. Network servers can be taken down, files on them can be removed, some recipients may not have Internet access but none of those cases lifts the obligation to provide source code. The only way a distributor can guarantee he'll always be able to meet that obligation is to be prepared to provide source on a physical medium. The case of providing downloadable source for downloadable software was actually viewed as falling under 3a, not 3b, that is source code being provided along with the software itself, which makes a world of difference in the distributor's obligations.
I think your point is missing reality a little. We have a few things to keep straight.
First and probably the most important is that not everyone who dislikes the **AAs voice their opinion for the GPL and vice versa. This means that you will see people vocal about one and not the other and when putting it all together, you see the static noise level to be about the same but totally neglect the fact that it is coming from different sources.
Second, And probably just as important, Most of the anti **IA people I speak to are in the position because of the what and how RIAA and the MPAA are handling things not because of their right to handle them. When they run threats of legal action in order to extort a settlement from the people who would seem to have the most difficulty defending from it, something is wrong. It would seem that if protecting against copy right infringement would be important, it would be important to go after everyone doing it and not just the people who stand a chance of having a successful defense.
I don't know of the GPL people going after widowed grandmothers who don't even own a computer and make them spend hundred if not thousands of dollars to prove that. I don't know of any GPL people falsely accusing people of infringement by infecting their computer and snooping around. I don't know of GPL people going around and writing virus and jamming networks with infect material in order to extract revenge on people and ruin their computer install because you used a legal service to do something legal.
If and when they start doing stuff like this and everything else the **IAs are doing, I will be just as vocal against them as some are for the **IAs. As it is, I don't usually comment in the RIAAs or whatever unless it is something really bad. So don't confuse the noise level on both as being from the same people or for the same reasons, they aren't.
Of course it does. The only thing that makes the GPL enforceable is copyright; when the copyright expires, it passes into the public domain just like everything else.
I take that partly back. It more completely passes into the public domain that a vast majority of software, because the source is easily available (copyright expiration wont make companies release the source).
It will (of course) be many years before any software copyrights expire (here in the States at least).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.