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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.)
It is NO damned different if you use a Proprietary Licensed product within your embedded device-
if you fail to abide by the terms of the license grant for the protected Work(s) you are using, you
can expect to get your ass sued at some point if it is found out that you're doing it.
It doesn't matter if it's GPLed.
It doesn't matter if it's MIT/X11 licensed.
It doesn't matter if from Microsoft under an EULA or one of the Shared Source licenses.
If you breach the terms of the licensing, you're guilty of breaking at least a civil contract if not
outright Patent or Copyright infringement- PERIOD.
There's no 'intricacies' involved with OSS in the first place- they're simpler licenses to follow.
I'd be leery of dealing with anyone selling proprietary anything these days because of those 'intricacies'
that are ALWAYS present with most proprietary products.
Name of the game: Don't Cheat. Don't Get Greedy. Abide by the license terms, whatever they might be.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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?No fees are required for any of the rights it grants, yet it puts restrictions on the exercise of those rights (or, if you prefer, the grants are not unlimited). This makes issues that are normally simple to figure out much more difficult.
For example, if two people negotiate a license agreement that says A can distribute B's book so long as B pays A 15% of the gross receipts, it's clear that the license makes the grant and that the payment is a secondary obligation. If there was non-payment, B would sue A for breach of contract but would have waived the right to sue for copyright infringement.
The GPL is much more complex because it is non-commercial. The "payment" in the form of reciprocation, yet it's written such that the "payment" is a condition precedent to the grant of rights rather than a secondary obligation. Also, there is no agreement between the two particular parties to the GPL.
There haven't been enough cases close to the GPL to figure out exactly what the rule is. The general rule is that things outside of copyright (such as payments) are secondary obligations, not conditions precedent but things inside of copyright (such as selling just film rights) are conditions precedent.
So if I license you to make a movie out my book and you have to pay me $1 million, if you don't pay me, that's a breach of contract. If you sell copies of my book, that's copyright infringement.
If the GPL is read as a license that waives the right to sue for copyright infringement, that would leave only the ability to sue for breach of contract. If the only penalty the contract allows is loss of license, it's not clear what happens. Do you get back the right you waived? The whole GPL then becomes self-referential. "I waive the right to sue you for copyright infringement so long as you give me the right to sue you for copyright infringement."
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.
IANAL, but the way I understand it, lost revenue is often difficult to prove. In cases where it can be established that the offending party knew that it was violating copyright and willfully did so anyway, however, the court can require payment of statutory damages (which can be much higher than any revenue the plaintiff might have actually lost). The only glitch here is that I was under the impression that you needed to have registered your work with the Copyright Office in advance in order to claim statutory damages.
Breakfast served all day!
Compensatory damages for open source projects is pretty easy to show. Just look at the prices open source companies charge for "commercial licenses". The claim can be made that by using the work without following the terms of the GPL the infringer is depriving the developers of similar revenues.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It is correct information. As soon as a person in the US creates a copyrightable work, it is immediately copyright to that person. The exception being if it is a work for hire. The issue of who has the copyright is set permanently at that moment.
The registration of a copyright is not required for a work to be copyright, it just has to be registered prior to filing suit. Doing so early on is a good idea as it makes it easier to defend in court, but it is definitely not compulsory to do so.
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hsc Has plenty of relevant information. As well as:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#cr
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.
you get the horns.
Because these guys were warned first that they were violating the GPL and did nothing until legal action was mentioned.
SCO was more of the opinion "We'll tell you what you're violating in court" without giving Linux a chance pre-lawyers.
It's turtles all the way down.
Good Legal Advice?
/. !!!!
THIS IS
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
License != Contract.
I guess you have consideration. What about the offer and acceptance? Do you really have an exchange of promises?
A license is not a contract. It is more a one-sided offer of permission to do something that would, without the license grant, be illegal. A license can have restrictions.
The idea with the GPL is it has restrictions. The logic is that if you don't comply with these restrictions then you never had the right to distribute. And in the case of a copyrighted work, if you redistribute without ownership or a license, and you do it willfully, then you are liable for 3x the statutory damages.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=212176&seqNum=3&rl=1
That's the theory anyway. I guess we'll see.
-- John.
- Injunction to stop infringing copyright
- actual damages
- profits from the infringement
- attorney fees
- anything else the court might want to do
As soon as the defendant complies with GPL, they aren't infringing, so #1 isn't a big deal.Actual damages? That's a big fat zero.
Profits? At this stage in the product's life-cycle, defendant probably isn't profitable yet, so that's likely to be another big fat zero.
Attorney fees. Finally something that might actually be non-zero!
I don't see much punishment happening here. They'll settle for attorney fees and some nice (to the developers) but insignificant (to the company) payment.
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.