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First US GPL Lawsuit Heads For Quick Settlement
DeviceGuru writes to tell us that the first lawsuit centered around the GPL seems to have been quickly resolved outside of the courtroom. Monsoon Multimedia was quick to admit that they had violated the GPLv2 in their modified BusyBox code and will soon be releasing the source to come into full compliance with the license.
Victory!!! ^_^
1. Violate GPL
2. Get sued and get massive publicity for your little device that's actually kinda cool, then settle
3. Profit!
While it would have been better had they not violated the GPL in the first place, but it is nice to see that Monsoon is able to admit their mistake and release the code according to the license. Too bad most companies are happy to fight it out in the courtrooms forever, or pay people off, than to stand up and admit when they were wrong.
Ignorance is the Agent of Fear; Fear Is the Agent of Violence - >1
They don't want the GPL to win in the courtroom.
On the other hand it is good this case seems to be resolved. Now, proceed onto the next violation.
It sets a really good example for others to follow. Now, when are we going to get AMD/ATI to publicly post their Linux work for the ATI Xilleon MIPS processors?
Monsoon Multimedia was quick to admit that they had violated the GPLv2 in their modified BusyBox code and will soon be releasing the source to come into full compliance with the license.
I hate to sound like a pessimist, but this sounds like nothing but a win for Monsoon. Number one, there's no mention of any cash payout, and number two, they get a shit-ton of free advertising for doing the "right thing".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I expect this could have all been settled without instigating a lawsuit. From what I heard they were notified of the GPL violation via a support forum. Good to see that the company are not assholes and are going to do the right thing but I suspect the situation could have been handled better by both parties.
or looking for a piece of ass?
While it's good that Monsoon's finally agreed to uphold the GPL agreement I was rather hoping that they'd hold out, if only to establish precedent for future actions.
Still, there's a chance that other companies approached by the SFLC will look to this act before deciding to refuse to comply with the GPL they're trading under.
Hopefully...
They did not win on technical grounds, and any sane (or insane) lawyer would have done the same.
They backed down once they found out RMS might be called to testify.
In reality, this means that there is still no precedent for the GPL in court which is a shame.
liqbase
It is too bad, in some ways, that it didn't go to court. Personally, I will sleep much more soundly when there is a precedent set which upholds the GPL as legally valid.
>Monsoon Multimedia was quick to admit that they had violated the GPLv2 in their modified BusyBox code and will soon be releasing the source to come into full compliance with the license.
They violated it and now they play time ("will soon be"). Better now than later.
You can't center "around" something. You can revolve around something or you can center ON something. But you can't center around. Doesn't even make sense and it's on two front-page Slashdot articles.
Usually, out of court settlements are secret. The fact that Monsoon is forced to publicly admit they were wrong, demonstrate what a losing position they were in.
The fact that this was the first American GPL suit demonstrates how clueless Monsoon were. It should never have got to this situation.
They should have given it more time to begin with. The GPL folks themselves had argued that one warning and - wham - suing wasn't a good way to deal with these issues.
Since the GPL is pretty straightforward and based on the same principles as 'normal' copyright, companies really don't make much of a chance, and they know it. A little bit of pressure, and even the obnoxious ones cave in rather soon, *without* having to go to court.
As long as violations can be solved this way, there really isn't a need to go the long and tedious legal way.
It would be nice to have a (legal) conformation of the validity of the GPL, but that would only be pro forma. It has an extreme likelihood of being legally sound and valid, and companies (and everyone else, really) know that - that's why they settle so fast in the first place.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
There is little victory in a settlement to release the code. The real victory would have indeed been a precedent for GPL.
this sounds like nothing but a win for Monsoon. ... there's no mention of any cash payout, and number two, they get a shit-ton of free advertising
It's another win for software freedom. We get their changes or they get hammered. The thing being advertised is that free software can be and is used for business. No one had to waste money on lawyers and everyone is happy.
For their reputation, it's a wash. Monsoon's reputation has been damaged by their original behavior but the settlement goes a long way to repairing that. The reputation enhancement they get from using free software is well deserved because free software has a well earned reputation for quality.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Their counsel were notified in writing and failed to respond.
You may argue that the time given for response was short,
but it should have been adequate given the nature of
the allegation.
Also don't assume that all interaction between the parties
is documented in the complaint.
I know, far fetched. But still, I love a good conspiracy theory.
THE FIRST US GPL CASE TOOK TWO YEARS TO SETTLE
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050225223848129
"Too bad most companies are happy to fight it out in the courtrooms forever, or pay people off, than to stand up and admit when they were wrong."
Pay people off? Like going straight to the developers, bypassing the GPL? Or hiring the developers?
The vast majority of legal cases reach a settlement before they even set foot in the court. No-one enjoys drawn out cases anyway (apart from the lawyers).
A.) Hire a lawyer and fight a court case you may or may not loose.
or
B.) Just release the source which costs you nothing
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It has an extreme likelihood of being legally sound and valid, and companies (and everyone else, really) know that - that's why they settle so fast in the first place.
Let's not forget that GPL settlements are usually much nicer than 'normal' copyright settlements.
Example: Violate Microsoft's copyright on some code, bundle it up in an executable, and start distributing it (heaven help you if you actually sell it). Think the settlement that Microsoft will offer you will be anywhere near as amicable as "Share your changes back to the rest of us." ?? Not on your life.
The fact that the GPL hasn't needed a legal confirmation gives testament to its simplicity and strength. These waters are filled with some *very* dangerous sharks that have had plenty of time to attack. It seems our shark cage is made of some pretty stern stuff.
It could be viewed that failing to follow the GPL is not a copyright violation, but a contractual violation.
That changes the game. That was a concern for the artistic license not too long ago.
It could happen. I hope not, but it could.
Ok, I give up, why you?
They'll bee az bizzee az beez in a bizzee bocks... bzzzzzt!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Here's the situation. A startup company took a GPL licensed program, made modifications to it and dynamically linked to a proprietary third party VOIP library. Initially they weren't going to release any of their modifications, but after being contacted by the developer they tried to come into compliance. However, the use of the proprietary VOIP library is not compatible with the GPL as they are unable to provide source code for it.
The startup company was the first to sick the lawyers on, but the developer has fought back better. For a while it looked like there was going to be a default judgment in the developer's favor but now it looks like it is going to court.
See http://www.jinchess.com/ichessu/ for more details.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The reason why no sane company will challenge the GPL is very simple, even if you win you lose. As soon as you have removed the GPL hurdle you then have the nightmare of copyright law to face. The GPL does not remove copyright its a usage agreement, so if the "agreement " is annulled in court then the code falls under well tested copyright law and thats even worse to deal with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License
The Artistic License has been criticized as "too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear." I guess the FSF pretty much called it. The GPL is way more bullet proof.
Why are you giving them so much credit? They basically told everyone to pound sand until the lawyers were whipped out, and then only backed down because they were outgunned.
That tells me they are a scumbag company ran by scumbags. Instead of doing what is right and working with everyone, they were selfish and scummy and forced everyone involved to go to court.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Now if someone would go after companies like PhotoVu and Olive, both of which are still in violation, along with dozens of others.
GPL is not prohibiting in principle the use of proprietary software in conjunction with GPL software, only using them in the same namespace
.so or DLL loader combines the two works at the same time that it loads them into memory, and copying into memory is not regarded as an act of copying that invokes copyright. What's more, mere USE of a library does not trigger the GPL, ever --- Eben Moglen has explained repeatedly that the GPL is not a usage licence, but only a distribution licence, and in the case of dynamic linking the two parts are distributed only as an aggregate.
Not so. The GPL explicitly allows distribution of a GPL-covered work in conjunction with a proprietary work when they are physically separate entities but placed together on the same storage medium as an aggregate. It says so in black and white. Aggregation is not derivation.
The only thing that the GPL forbids is distribution of a statically linked binary comprised of those two, because that's a single work, and hence clearly the executable is then a derived work of the GPL-covered work.
It does NOT forbid dynamic linking at all, because the
So you've got it wrong. *Using* them in the same namespace is unrelated to distribution, and distribution is the only thing that triggers the GPL.
They expected to get sued for free publicity. Then settled.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
let me guess, either a TV wrestler or some new NASCAR sponsor??
Copyright ultimately gives the GPL those "legs" you're so proud of. No copyright? Monsoon Multimedia gets away scot-free. Something for the "I hate IP" crowd to think about.
"Also, there have been a few companies that have gotten to the stage Monsoon has and they've folded their hand when lawyers get involved. That says something."
Have you hugged your lawyer, today?
The FSF has resolved a lot of similar cases without going to court. After the situation is explained to them, all the companies up until now has accepted to either withdraw the infringing code, or release it under the terms of the GPL.
Either Monsoon Multimedia is more stubborn than most, or the BusyBox developers lack the finesse of the FSF.
What makes something a derivative work, in terms of compiled software code, therefore requiring the the derivative work be required to be licensed under the GPL or even belong to the original copyright owner.
It seems unlikely that a Court would see program Foo available under the GPL, and rule that the GPL is somehow unfair and shouldn't be enforceable. But what would a court rule? What about derivative works.
For example, if I take Application Foo, modify it to be a library that is called by my Application Bar, a court might logically conclude that it is a derivative work if Bar is pretty trivial... Maybe a court would care about static linking vs. dynamic linking vs. sockets, but I have no idea what they would think of the matter.
In a more complicated sense, if Application Foo is 95% of the Foo-Bar combination, Foo-Bar is clearly derived from Foo. However, what if Foo is only 5% of the Application, is Foo-Bar still a derivative work?
What if a court rules that Bar is NOT a derivative work, not bound by the GPL? Well, they still need a distribution license for Foo, right? Well, maybe... if Foo has a single owner, perhaps a Court decides to award damages halt the shipment unless a licensing agreement is reached. A court might decide that given the general free licensing of Foo, there are no damages, and therefore they will only order damages with a reasonable licensing agreement going forward.
What if there are multiple owners of Foo, all licensed under the GPL, and none of them comprise a substantial amount of the combined Foo-Bar code? What if the authors of Bar contacted the listed authors about distribution, and most of the emails came back with no response? Might a court rule that they have abandoned the software? It shouldn't matter, but who knows. Most abandon-ware issues involve software that conceivably could be re-released commercially. What happens when the authors all disappear, or most of them? If you owners of the copyright are unreachable, and the ones taking action are only owners of trivial amounts of the code, might the courts just decide that they have no standing and go home?
The BIG concern with the GPL falling is that the courts decide that by releasing the source code, binaries, and everything freely with no "use" license to the general public, that you have effectively placed your software in the public domain. That seems like a bigger risk for the "thousands of authors" projects, because if a program has a single author that makes it available under the GPL, and is contactable, it might be seen as reasonable if there is the ability to license it under other terms.
There is also the issue of patches. Does the submitted of a patch ACTUALLY have copyright on it? That is assumed as given on Slashdot, but I'm not 100% convinced. The patch is CLEARLY a derivative work, and isn't necessary a creative expression protected under copyright. If it is a bug fix, it seems that a court might reasonably conclude that this is simply a factual correction, and not be protected.
It seems unlikely that a court will rules that you can take GPL'd code, wrap your extensions on it, and do what you want. However, if you are UNABLE to comply (closed source library that you call), I have NO IDEA what a court would decide. They might decide that it is infringement, find for the plaintiff for $1 and close the case, who knows.
The court challenges won't be head on, they'll be over minor areas of disagreement.
No, but you can centre around it.
This has no correct assumptions in it. The author/s have not given up their ownership of their work. It is still their copyright and is NOT public domain. The GPL is NOT a contract. It's a license offered by the author/s of the code. The license declares the conditions under which the license is valid and the actions that someone using the code may take that will terminate the license. Effectively, it says, "here is some code you may find useful. I am releasing it for use under the following conditions. If you do not like these conditions, write you own code. If you use our code in ways that we have not licensed (for which your are not granted explicit permission under the GPL) we will sue you for copyright infringement and theft." That is quite simple. Any one can go to the trouble of reinventing the wheel if they don't want to comply with the GPL.
No one is obligated to use the code and only a lazy, greedy sucker will simply try to steal the code. There have already been a couple of suits tossed out of court because the plaintiffs were too stupid to understand that GPL'd code is open source and not public domain. All the GPL does is protect the rights of the authors of the code from having their work appropriated by some lazy slob who likes the work of others, but doesn't want to pay for it, or share any gain accrued by using it commercially. Effectively, the GPL is a license that declares what the authors of the code consider "fair use." It extends the domain of fair use beyond what basic copyright law provides. If you do not like GPL'd code, you are free to not use it, or use it only under the conditions that copyright law permits.
I wonder how much money changed hands in this settlement? It's not that protecting free software is free as in beer.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
If you loose the case you get smoked for copyright infingement, ... should be If you lose the case you get smoked for copyright infingement,....
You might also want to check the spelling on infringement, note the r after the f.
Cheers!
I used this to explain GPL vs proprietary to a non-techy friend: Suppose I owned a good fishing spot coupla acres big. Friend Joe asks if he can fish from there, I say "sure, but share". He's ok with that. He comes back, says it's great, but his wife doesn't like to get her feet wet...would I build a dock? No, but he can, with this provision: He must allow anyone to use the dock, if I let them use the land. I promise that no one will get exclusive use of the land. Joe's ok with that.
Fred loves it too, but is tired of dragging his BBQ equip out there twice a year, and asks to build a brick grill. Same rules: All who share the land share the dock and the grill.
Time goes on, and we all get the use of each other's efforts in making a good fishing spot into a great getaway.
Each thing added to the land belongs to the person who added it. If anyone doesn't like the rules I run my land by, they are free to go somewhere else. They just can't use my fishing spot if they won't share.
The diff with software under the GPL: Everyone can simultaneously use a virtual BBQ. Physical laws mean the BBQ at the fishing hole has be shared by timeslice, and that I can't share with EVERYONE, only a few dozen or so buddies.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
The difference between contract and license: A license allows one to do something that otherwise would be illegal, such as drive, perform brain surgery, distribute someone else's copyrighted work. In both contracts and licenses, considerations may change hands - such as money. But a contract can NEVER make an illegal act legal unless license rights are part of the considerations changing hands. (See SCO v. World)
Contracts also must be agreed to by all parties. GPL is a license because I can release my works under the GPL with no else's consent. Software released to users under the GPL do not require "click thru" agreements because they are pure license, not contracts.
Microsoft's "End User License Agreement" is a contract, because it requires the user's agreement. That's why such horrific "EULA"s have a shred of legitimacy.
Breach of the GPL (or any copyright) is called infringement, not violation.
Copyright infringers can NOT be sued for breach of contract because they haven't signed a contract. If they haven't complied with the license terms, then they can not legally distribute dirative works. Period. No other legal considerations involved.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
"Your uninformedness is showing."
That's not even a word
It's a perfectly cromulent word. You just need to get an embiggened dictionary.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
usation determines definage.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
First of all, loading into memory IS an act of copying that invokes copyright in the United States. Look up U.S. Code Title 17, Section 117. The courts have held that in several cases. The reason that we can use them is because congress specifically carved out exceptions so that a person who rightfully posesses software can load it into memory to use it and also to make an archival backup copy. Second, the FSF's position is that dynamic linking creates a derivative work that must be distributed under the GPL. I'm not sure whether that would legally constitute copyright infringement on its own, but by using teh library at all you are agreeing to the GPL, so contract law might be used to force compliance.
I am not a lawyer, seek a lawyer out if you want legal advice.
He doesn't explain how it will be resolved.
There has been no statement from the SFLC or the Busybox developers.
So is this really resolved? Or is this just some BS attempt at damage control?
Re:Nice to see a company admit it's mistake
Well, someone needs to be a Spelling Nazi, because you've just made the opposite error. It's not uncommon to react against a common error by 'correcting' non-errors. I have lost count of the sportscasters who say things like "That's between he and the coach", overcorrecting the tendency to use objective forms like "him" in the nominative. In print, we find "and" used as an article, ("...and exception to the provision...") as if "an" were a low-class contraction for the more formal "and".I'm proud to be a Grammar Nazi, actually. If you're going to work in technology, you know that you must use the right syntax to communicate with your compiler; why people think they can express themselves sloppily to humans but not to computers is a mystery to me. And I'm sick of trying to explain the difference between a slash and a backslash to people who don't think it matters, because "you know what I mean!"
That relates to the MS strategy to attack the GPL in this way: I think that GPLv3 gives them a lot of ammo in the Viral department. People are actually claiming that reselling Novell support certificates constitutes 'conveyance' under GPLv3, which is beyond even 'viral'. It's as if even talking to someone who distributes GPLv3 software makes you subject to its provisions.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Yes, by International Treaty and somewhat compliance with US law, any creation is automatically copyrighted. That doesn't mean that a court will rule that everything is a derivative. There are a lot of claims via the GPL FAQ and other assertions that quite frankly have NEVER been established by court precedent. Most of copyright law is derived from Common Law, Precedents, and to a much lesser extent, statutes.
The FSF requires assignment of copyright because as the sole holder of the copyrights, they have standing to enforce it.
We actually have NO clue what a court would rule with a use of a GPL'd library that is a small component of a larger application, where the GPL'd library is owned by multiple authors. A court COULD rule that the GPL is in effect, and either cease distributing or comply, or it could rule that nobody has standing to sue, so while the code is used without license, nobody can enforce it.
A trademark is "lost" from lack of enforcement, a copyright is not. However, maintaining copyright, and have standing to sue, are very difference.
Statutory penalties ONLY apply to copyrights registered with the government, which given the release early, release often mantra of open source projects, is relatively impossible. If you don't register each version, and they use a non-registered version, it's very possible that statutory penalties will not apply.
Unfortunately, as you can see, Slashdot turns many IPA symbols into question marks, so I can't really see what you were trying to show me.
However, dictionary.com's pronunciation, which uses ordinary letters, is "kuhmf-tuh-buhl" and "kuhm-fer-tuh-buhl", the second being similar to the way that I pronounce it, with no "ter" in there anywhere.
The American Heritage Dictionary entry, further down the page, shows the pronunciations (again, screwed up by Slashdot) "km'fr-t-bl", "kmf't-bl", and "kmf'tr-", the first being most similar to the way that I pronounce it, and the third being most similar to the way that you claim that most Americans pronounce it.
I pronounce the "t" in "tsunami", though probably not as hard as the Japanese do.
Yeah, well, I do pronounce "ps" as "s" when it begins a word ("psych-", "pseudo-", etc.).
No, I don't; I just find it annoying.
Similarly, I find Rap and Hip-hop annoying, but that doesn't mean that I "presume" that everyone should listen to rock, jazz, and new-age; it just means that I find Rap and Hip-hop annoying.
Note, again, that dictionary.com shows that the correct pronunciation of jewelry is not "joo-ler-ee".
(And so forth.)
Now, does this mean that people who say "jew-ler-ee" should be beaten with a stick until they pronounce it correctly?
Probably not.
But it does mean that they are not pronouncing it correctly, at least, not yet.
(It's true that it may, at some point, be considered correct, but it isn't yet.)
One of my college professor's parents were from Scotland, and his wife was from the American Deep South.
He took his wife back Scotland for a visit.
His wife and relatives couldn't understand each other, despite that fact that they both were speaking English; their accents were too different.
American English and British English are diverging in many ways, in pronunciation ("issue", "clerk"), spelling ("color" vs "colour"), and even vocabulary ("truck" vs "lorry", "naught" vs "zero").
There are also probably many ways in which they are converging, although I can't think of any off the top of my head ("billion" meaning "thousand million" instead of "thousand thousand million"?).
(I sometimes say "lift" instead of "elevator", but that may be due more to the influence of Star Trek than shows on BBC America.)
Actually, I pronounce "they're" differently than "there" and "their".
I think that it is more likely that most of the people who misuse "affect" and "effect" do so because they don't really know the difference between the two.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
[t] and [s] are articulated at the same point. The Japanese "t" in this instance is non-aspirated, non-ejective, non-retroflex, non blah blah blah. It's is a light articulation of on the alveolar ridge, to produce what is called an "affricative". The Japanese do not pronounce this "t" very hard, and if you were to pronounce the "t" any lighter, it would be an "s". I did oral mentoring for awhile for a Japanese class, the students were unable to recognize if they were saying "ts" or "s" in spontaneous speech. PURPOSEFULLY paying attention to their speech, they could articulate it appropriately.
However, you may be different and actually articulate the "t" rather than just omitting it in spontaneous speech like the vast majority Americans do. However, my position is that the majority of Americans say "soo-nah-mee", not "tsoo-na-mee". Not to mention every Japanese word that ends in "-e" is massively mutilated by American phonology, and takes it from an "-eh" to an "-ee". So you have "sah-kee" (not "sah-keh") and "keh-ree-oh-kee" (not "kah-rah-oh-keh"... I'll give them a pass for misarticulating the "r", they've likely never been exposed to that sound before, but all the vowels are there.)
Funny, German doesn't have any problem with this: "auszeichnen" -> "ausgezeichnet", "mitteilen" -> "mitgeteilt", "überfahren" -> "übergefahrt". The answer to your examples are "backsup", "madeup" and "settingup". You're composing the words how you presume that they should be dealt with "there's a no space between them, so the ending goes at the end!" No, wrong. The verbial stems go on the verbial element, not to any additional forms that occur.
Not always.
For example, "upgrade", "bypass".
Ok, this is where things get tricky... because now you have to start distinguishing how the words are actually treated, not just "do they contain a verbial word, and a prepositional word?" The reason why, is these words are no longer considered separable. They have been taken into the English language as individual units, and not as individual parts. They are the same as "include", "assimilate", "impersonate" and "expel". Just instead we can actually recognize the roots, rather than them being relatively unknown, the examples being composed of: "in - clude", "ad - similate", "in - personate" and "ex - pell".
Your use of "blindfold" and "forecast" are particularly inappropriate, as we do not use a preposition "fore-" anymore, as all words that use that root word are now inseparable. While "blindfold" is not a verb with a prepositional inclusion, which is what I am limiting my argument to. (By nature of compound verbs like "blindfold", they are placed as a single "lexeme" in our dictionaries, not as individual parts that contribute to the whole of the meaning. It's just a little harder to notice when the words actually relate to the words used... unlike "butterfly".)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Wow. I think that that is the first time that I've seen a comment that is actually informative overflow that limit I have set, and give a "Read the rest of this comment" link. :-) Congratulations! ;-)
:-) On the positive side concerning the Chinese, at least I can pronounce "Beijing" correctly - which escapes 99.9 percent of the people that I have heard on television trying to say the name of the capital of China.
Thanks for taking the time to write all that up. I took a linguistics course many years ago, and the instructor did most of the examples in Turkish. I think that he explained why, at one point, but that is gone from my memory. I loved the course, though. I was fortunate to have a strong background in Russian at the time (also mostly gone now), so I had exposure to non-Latin script and sounds beyond those that English has ('ts' and 'shch', for example). Even now, I can listen to a fluent Russian speaker and pick out the words, even though I no longer remember what each one means.
It's a very useful thing to study multiple languages, not only for the linguistic knowledge but also for the awareness that it gives of how the concept maps differ. I had a very hard time with Chinese (and never got to the point where I would say that I could speak the language), but Irish was somewhat easier. I am still having trouble with the pronunciation rules, though.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...