Slashdot Mirror
GPL Lawsuit May Not Settle
A number of readers wrote in to inform us that contrary to earlier indications, it's no sure thing that the lawsuit alleging GPL violation by Monsoon Multimedia will get settled out of court. Linux.com now reports that the SFLC's legal director Daniel Ravicher has stressed that no agreement has been reached: "Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance." (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of Sourceforge, Inc.)
I don't doubt that you're right: PHBs may indeed get scared by "if you use GPL code you could end up in court" worries (or FUD, as the case may be).
But I find that rather amusing. I mean, it's not like the liability or damages would be less if you somehow ('accidentally' ?) shipped proprietary software (binary or source) with your product. In fact, I imagine a proprietary software vendor would be even less forgiving than the FOSS community. It's not like FOSS is demanding greater vigilance than proprietary equivalents: just read the license before you distribute it!
I guess it's hard for some people to understand the concept of free software licensing. They think that if they can see the code (and download it gratis from a web server), then they can do whatever they want with it. Really, it shows that many people who are in the business of making money off of copyright law (and copyright law applied to software in particular) don't pay much attention to how it works.
Using GPL software without complying with the GPL is a liability for any business. As is using any proprietary software without complying with the license that comes with the software.
But what would compel a company to support FreeBSD when they could just take the code, use it for their own needs, and never make upstream contributions?Does an admittedly left leaning GPL
Jeepers! I feel much stupider having read that. The GPL is a software license. It can't hold an opinion on the old order following the French Revolution.
and they could declare the GPL to be in violation of anti-trust, unconstitutional because it is non-commercial
Anti-trust? WTF? Non commercial? You can use the GPL license to cover commercial software all you like. Do you have any understanding of the issues here?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
If you think distributing GPL software is bad for your business, try distributing pirate copies of Microsoft Windows with your product. You'll get to see just how "dangerous" a license can be.
The fact is that infringing other people's copyrights is a bad business move. It does not matter at all what mechanism the rightsholders are using to protect their copyrights.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
None of the various Creative Commons licenses are listed on OpenSource Initiative's (OSI's) approved license page, so raising it in the context of OSS licenses is a bit of a stretch.
The very points you raise may be why it has not met with OSI approval, but there I'm speculating.
-- Alastair
Using any licensed intellectual property without complying with the appropriate license is a liability for any business, and they know it. The difference here is that there is a perception in business that Open Source projects are operated by dirty hippies that don't have it "together" enough to do anything about it (nor the money, even if they did have it "together").
This is why it's important for this suit to move forward with an objective of some type of damages and at least attorney fees. This will send the message to business that there are repercussions to ignoring or trying to circumvent Open Source licenses like the GPL.
The only businesses that will be scared off from using Open Source because of this are dishonest businesses that shouldn't be allowed to use Open Source anyway
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
how the fuck can they make this claim, yet when SCO filed it's complaint, the open source community's response was "all we have to do is fix the infringment" - the very same claim now being denied.
you can't have it all your own way.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
[quote] But what would compel a company to support FreeBSD when they could just take the code, use it for their own needs, and never make upstream contributions? [/quote]
Nothing. IANAL, but I can take any gpl'd program, modify it, and use it for my own needs. Only when I re-distribute the software, do I need to release the code.
Go ahead. Flame me if I'm wrong. I'm a CP/M uzer.
Who was hurt? Perhaps the authors because the thieves were making a lot of money with the stolen code? There's got to be a ton of precedent for awarding damages to the owner of a copyright when someone else is illegally profiting from the sale of that copyrighted work.
The Farewell Tour II
As I understand it from reading Slashdot, the "loss of revenue" and "copyright infringement" arguments are essentially bullshit when the *AA uses them. So how is the SFLC (nee the FSF) any different?
When this story broke a few days ago I theorized that they were more than entitled to try to get this company to comply with the license. Maybe even make them donate money to Busybox. Heck, even try to get an injunction to make Monsoon stop selling their device until they came into compliance.
But damages? For copyright infringement and loss of revenue? The irony there is just too good to be true.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
However your running under the assumption that GPL is very close to Public Domain. It's pretty restrictive.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
There, fixed that for you. If you agree that parties like the RIAA and MPAA are wrong, deceitful, and unfair when they mislabel copyright infringement as "theft" or "stealing" -- and you should agree -- then you shouldn't mislabel the offense either. Hypocrisy* is bad, mmkay?
(*Obviously, if you agree with the RIAA's diction then you're not hypocritical, but that's unlikely because you would be in the minority of Slashdot readers. If that's the case, I apologize.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
No, it isn't the same. When you take GPL code and violate the license you are making the assertion that the code is yours. This is theft. I have yet to hear of someone making a claim of ownership of a work when "pirating" movies or music.
Perhaps I am mistaken and this company admitted that they were using GPL software and not releasing the code. But that is rarely, if ever, the case and it is pretty safe to assume that they were just hoping that no one would notice what they were doing as that is usually (again, if not ALWAYS) the case in these situations.
That comments such as yours, which are all noise and no content, get modded insightful speaks quite poorly for the moderators of this site.
The Farewell Tour II
> But what would compel a company to support FreeBSD when they could just take the code, use
> it for their own needs, and never make upstream contributions?
When the Netscape codes was released (as Mozilla), they claimed that "the stupidity tax" would prevent this. The stupidity tax is the extra effort you have to take to re-port your proprietary additions to each new release of the base code.
Isolated, I believe the stupidity tax is enough to make it worthwhile to contribute your additions back, at least if the base project has a strong following.
However, the reason a copyleft license like nonetheless GPL is generally preferred by businesses is friendly than a "almost-pd" license like BSDL, is concern about what the competitors do. Will they take your additions in their product, but never release their own additions?
With BSDL (or similar) companies will pay the stupidity tax in fear of giving the competition an unfair advantage. Which will hurt all the users of the base code. With the GPL, that unfair advantage is not an option, so business will be far more willing to share their improvements for the benefit of both themselves and other users.
This is why BSD is dying.
Imagine Microsoft wanted to use some code that is published under the GPL. It doesn't really make a difference, but we can imagine that Microsoft has money in the bank, and wouldn't do something obviously illegal.
Microsoft has two choices: Use the code and follow the rules of the GPL license, or find the copyright holders and offer them money for a proprietary license. If they go the second route, unless the copyright holders for some reason refuse any business with Microsoft, there will be an agreement in the end where Microsoft will pay a certain amount to the copyright holders.
If someone else just copies the code and then doesn't follow the rules of the GPL license, the fair market value determined by our Microsoft thought experiment would be the damages. That would likely be tripled for punitive reasons (otherwise a company could just steal anything, if they didn't get caught they'd be fine and if they got caught, they would only pay what they owed anyway).
And there is real precedence, like Apple first paying for a proprietary license to CUPS and then buying the copyrights to CUPS.
The central thrust of the Free Software philosophy in general is that the inability to modify and share software and hardware is bad. To avoid this, instead of exchanging money for software, we exchange the promise of continued ability to modify for software. While it may seem like socialism to someone not familiar to zero-cost goods because of the lack of money exchanged per-copy, the renumeration that classical capitalists would recognize is still there, though in a different form.
Furthermore, there appears to be a misconception that producers somehow lose their rights when they license their works under FOSS terms. The rights of producers and their maintenance is the very thing that enables FOSS to work, and the very thing that the GNU GPL and the SFLC seeks to protect. Without those rights the GNU GPL would be little more than the MIT license, and copyleft would not exist.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
Except they weren't "giving it away". They were making it available subject to conditions, and Monsoon Multimedia defaulted on those conditions. Therefore, permission to copy the code was not granted and Monsoon Multimedia infringed copyright.
Just because you pay the bill for your land line in arrears, doesn't mean the telephone company can't take action if you go ringing people in India, Botswana and Malaysia and then decide not to pay for the calls! And taking a paper from the railway station newsagents and not using the honesty box is still shoplifting. The fact of the goods being offered before any obligation is fulfilled, in no way diminishes the obligation.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
No one disputes that downloading a song without the rights to it is copyright infringement. Noncommercial infringement (listening to a pirated song, etc.) is (or should be) different from commercial infringement. One person downloading songs to check them out is one thing, and using code illegally in a product you charge top dollar for is another. Arguing that one song is worth $3000 or so is crazy, but saying that illegitimately using Busybox in their product is worth money is another.
There's also a correlation argument. The correlation between downloaded MP3s and lost sales is likely pretty low. However, their product needs a Linux toolkit, so they would inevitably have used Busybox or the GNU toolchain.
So if I offer a book for sale, and no one ever buys it, but you start start selling bootlegs does that mean there is no damages?
Of course the court may determine it as such, but I doubt it.
I would calculate the damages for illegal use of my code in a commercial product as being a percentage of the retail dollars brought in. I would hire an expert to say (independently decide) that 20% (or whatever) of the value of the product comes from the code, and it is reasonable to assume that 50% of retail price is the cost. So damages would be 10% of the total money spent on the product by consumers (since it would be reasonable to expect that's what would be spent on buying the software).
Another solution would be to say we are 20% responsiblke for the product, and therefore want 20% of the profit, but that sounds like a bad idea for some company that is probably losing money.
But there are ways to assess damages that could probably hold up, even if something has never been sold (see patent trolls)
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg