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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)."
What a bunch of GPL Nazis.
Noone would be convicted of "breaching the GPL". The GPL is not an EULA. If you violate the terms of the GPL, you are (re)distributing without a license permitting you to do so (since the GPL, which you violated, is the only thing that gives you permission to do so), which is a copyright violation, not a GPL violation. I wish articles would get the specifics right.
Court upholding GPL - Good!
Conviction for copyright violation - Bad!
What's a loyal drone to believe anymore??
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Why not!
In any case you have completely misrepresented peoples positions and conflated different groups.
Don't look now but I think your strawman is on fire.
Yes we can. And do. You see, RIAA/MPAA are evil. The OSS guys are good. Haven't you seen Star Wars?
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
The actual problem is that they did not include the text of the GPL with the phone. The summary here in Slashdot didn't mention that, and had me wondering what the problem with the provided URL was.
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
Umm, I think you'd find many people on /. would gladly let groups like the RIAA and MPAA hold onto copyrights if they didn't exert such a stranglehold on them and for so long.
What we're opposed to are the draconian enforcement and perpetual lengthening of copyright expiration.
So...no. I don't see where your argument has solid ground to stand on.
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.
Can also check out this link for more info here
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
My German is a bit rusty, but I'm pretty sure that "Server Error" is not a very good translation.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's a wonder why Microsoft hates the GPL, Balmer is afraid of GRUB(s)
load "$",8,1
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."
I don't believe that copyright drives innovation -- innovation usually means providing a new direction or addition to a previous product that someone else likely designed, which was "innovated" from a previous product that another designed. New ideas based on old ideas, etc.
What drives innovation is a desire to capture a particular market share for a demand, in effect providing a new supply stream for an existing demand, or hoping to create demand due to a new supply stream for a new product or feature.
In my opinion, it is the combination of features, at a given price, backed by a given support structure, with promises to function at a given level of operation, that matter most. In this case, it isn't copyright that provides for a "winner" in that market of supply and demand, it is the person who releases the best combination of features+price+support+quality to a market that desires it, that wins, if that person markets the product properly.
Copyright merely restricts competition from doing better than the originator of that particular product or service, and does the market a disservice by reducing the opportunity for other producers to do something one step better.
What you may not do, is to distribute them for your gains.
'for your gains' is not a required condition.
After a previous conviction, a sheet was included
... ...
with the phone that contained URLs to the GPL-
license and to the source code . The articles do
not make any statement on whether the source code
contained all modifications, but they do not claim
otherwise.
The court decided that providing only an URL to the
license was not enough and that the whole license
should have been included in printed form.
So far, so good. Now the interesting part is that
according to the judge, providing a link to the
source code is only acceptable for software that
is provided on the internet. For software that comes
preinstalled, the source must also be delivered with
the device.
This decision seems extremely strange to me. It is
not what I read in the GPL v2. Here is the relevant
part:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the
following:
a)
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost
of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
c)
The only thing Skype did wrong, which the summary doesn't mention but someone else did, is that they didn't include a copy of the GPL with the phone.
The court said including a website address to where the source could be downloaded wasn't good enough. I'd like to know why that wasn't good enough. Is it only because the text of the GPL wasn't included?
This doesn't look like a win for the GPL. This looks like a major pain in the ass. I didn't even know that distributing a copy of the GPL was a requirement. I've never read it fully, but I guess I just assumed that as long as you make the source code available, everything is fine.
Zwar wurde dem Gerät später ein Beiblatt beigelegt, das auf die verwendete GPL-Software verwies und eine URL enthielt, wo die Quelltexte abrufbar sind - doch dies genügte dem Gericht im vorliegenden Fall nicht. Diese Möglichkeit sehe die GPL nur für Software vor, die über das Internet geliefert wird.
Rough translation (but better than google):
"Later a note was included with the device, which said it used GPL software and a URL where the source code is available - but this was not enough for the court. The GPL only permits this for software that is delivered over the Internet."
Doesn't that get covered by 6 b) 2):
"6. Conveying Non-Source Forms.
You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:
(...)
b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (...) or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge."
Or maybe it didn't come as a permanent offer, in which case they might be talking about 6 d):
"d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. (...)"
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Thats actually just fine under the GPL, but when you hand that executable to someone else, thats when the GPL is invoked. If you grab some code change it and just use it for yourself you do not need to do anything, but when you distibute it, by putting it on phones you sell, or putting the binary up for download somewhere you must also include the source.
Yes, the GPL says specifically that you must include a copy of the GPL to make sure the user knows his rights.
.... and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program."
Section 1:
"You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
My Babylon
It's not fair use, because copies of software that are made for the purpose of using it are not covered by copyright in the first place. The law is explicit about this:
In short: It's not fair use (that's a different set of exemptions), but it is legal.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Assuming Linus lives to at least 70 (born in 1969), the Linux kernel will not be released into the public domain for another 101 years or so. And that's only the parts he wrote. I think it's safe to say that the FOSS community will not be harmed by the release of what will then probably be an ancient and rather quaint bit of software from the turn of the last century.
Skype's business doesn't require secret proprietry code It's a service, and they givwe the client software away. They could rewrite from scratch at greater expense, and there may be a valid business reason to do so, but it's not goin to resuolt ina major impact for open source.
Countless businesses use GPL software for all sorts of reasons - whether internally or for bespoke systems. Skype deciding not to isn't going to harm the cause. On the other hand, Skype getting away with not following the terms honourably will harm the free software movement - or at least the FSF's free software movement.
Okay, it is Germany, and I'm going to use the definitions based under American law, but I'm 99% sure the same holds true in Germany.
A conviction is for criminal court. Copywrite law falls under civil law. No one from Skype is going to jail and no one is going to pay a huge fine to the government. However, the organization that won this case could potentially get a tidy sum.
Let's just pile onto the inaccuracies of the summary for this article. Let's hear it for inflamatory, add-pumping summaries!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This guy is waging a one-man show against GPL violators. Oh, the EFF is involved to some extent, but their effort is not Harald's. Harald, by the way, is the lead on the ipfilters project, something many /.'ers have probably heard of.
He is swamped with submissions from folks claiming this company or that is in violation of the GPL. I submitted one myself about a year and a half ago. Nothing ever came of it. Not because the company is innocent, but because Harald has very few resources to go after the perpetrators of GPL license abuse. When a company gets reported he has to physically buy the item - most violators seem to be in the embedded Linux area - and verify the GPL violations before putting the lawyer(s) on them. He has scored some notable successes.
But he is basically pissing into the wind. For every successful case he pursues there are 10 more that go unpunished. The real people who should be up in arms against commercial violators of the GPL are the authors who hold the copyright on the code being misused.
Sadly, most of them can't be bothered and the violations go on. This will be the end of the GPL: developers who do not care to enforce their rights. Not v3 or v4, or Linus or Stallman or tiny paragraphs in section 1. At some point there will be a case where an evildoer will use the defense that since the copyright holder didn't pursue company X 5 years ago they should be prevented from trying to do it now. And poof! The copyright will vanish or be declared null and void and with it the GPL distribution license that goes along with it.
Hooray for Harald! Watch out for the backspray, Harald.
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.
We also (And I think I speak for everyone of favor of copyrights 'round here) would like to see copyrights for something made today expire sometime in our lifetime. The original copyright term was just about right. That shit was never meant to last forever. Sure that'd mean that the original windows and linux source would be going to the public domain right about now, but that's just more incentive to innovate on the part of the folks who wrote that stuff.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Someone ist sehr crankisch.
Seriously, looking at http://gpl-violations.org/support.html everyone can see that Harald is asking for help in maintaining the site - and the site badly needs it.
/. why not help running gpl-violations.org?
So, instead of talking about the GPL on
I started reading the threats but stopped after the first few *5* rated articles ;D
...
... like: by using this software you also a accept that the nazis did not committed a holocaust. In germany claiming in public that "the nazis did not commit the holocaust" is a legal offense. So having a license including legal offenses you had a license that would be void or tangible. But still you could not distribute the code of the copyright holder ... because your act of distribution has nothing to do with the license but only with copyright.
What me rely wonders is this wording A German court has once again upheld the GPLv2 .
No! A german court did not upheld the GPL. No court is interested in the GPL. the court honoured copyright law. The authors of the code in question are the copyright owners. The company distributing the code is not a copyright owner. The license is completely irrelevant.
Notpicking mode on:
A license could be void if it contained illegal terms, like: you agree to hand over your first born son, and his first born son and also his up to the 17th generation to follow to (insert your name here)
In this case the license would be void. Not copyright! You still had no right whatsoever to distribute the code / IP of the legal owners.
The court did not uphold the GPL. It only decided that Skype violated the GPL and in doing so violated copyright law If you violate a BSD or MIT license you violate copyright law as well.
To uphold a license you would need to challenge the legal-ness of the license. So instead of suing Skype for breaking copyright law you would need to sue the author over using an illegal license. However there is no real applicable law here. You could construct a case probably by having a license that also encourages murder and rape
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
On top of that, the GPL itself specifically states that running the program is outside the license and is always permitted.
Certainly.
Provided that you (the copyright holder) generate them (by running the compiler/linker/etc.), certainly, they are included as part of the original copyrighted work (or perhaps another copyrighted work, the distinction is probably unimportant in most cases, though for copyright time limits it may be important if the source is recompiled differently at a later time.)
An infinitely large number. But copyrights aren't patents, so if someone else happens to generate the same executable from their own independently developed source that I developed from my copyrighted source, we could both have copyright on our own soure, and each have a independent copyright to the identical executable.
Copyrights do extend to things that don't exist at the time the original work is created; all derivative works, for instance, by definition do not exist when the original work is created, yet are covered by copyright.
No, because while identical, the code is not in fact derived from your original expression. This is where copyrights differ from patents (aside from the kind of things they apply to), because the latter covers even independent inventions, while copyright only protects copies, not coincidences.
It applies to both, but not to independently developed works, however similar (though proving that a work is independently developed may be a challenge if the similarities are so strong as to make coincidence seem unlikely.)
You did create a new, different work. However, it is a derivative work, and thus probably violates copyright unless some special exception applies.
No, not really.
Given your admitted ignorance of copyright,
RTFM
They convicted SMC, who makes a Skype phone, of the GPL violation because they didn't include the source code with the phone. NOT skype
how can every slashdot mod and user be completely wrong?
There isn't one. When you make a copy of a copyrighted web page in order to browse it, as you necessarily must, if only into RAM, you had better either have a license (either express or implied), or an applicable exception, or else you're infringing. So say the courts.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You have read about the OpenMoko Neo 1973 open-platform cell-phone, right? The developer version (sans-wifi) is available now, and the consumer-ready version will ship in October. It's linux-based, and 100% open-source (both hardward and software) for a price comparable to the iPhone.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
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.
Skype is hard to firewall. This means that if you can get to the internet with your PC, you can normally access Skype. I'm sure that hotels would like to stop it to force into using their expensive telephones. Mobiles aren't always an option when you are travelling overseas due to extortionate roaming rates. Skype has saved me a fortune on international calls.
See my journal, I write things there