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.)
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.