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GPL vs. Skype Back In Court
mollyhackit writes "Hackaday reports that the GPL vs Skype case is going back to court today. This as an appeal to the court's decision Slashdot reported last July. The original case was brought against Skype for the Linux based SMC Skype WiFi phone. The court upheld the GPLv2 and decided that Skype had not gone far enough in meeting section 3 which details how to provide the original source. This time around Skype is apparently trying to argue that the GPL violates anti-trust regulations."
Or you could use that free thing, add value to it and post the source code like you are supposed to. Then you save money and help out the public good all at the same time. That is how GPL is supposed to work.
I think, Bruce, that the difference in this case is that it's being tried in Germany, not the US. I suspect that Germany puts as much value on US precedence as the US puts in Germany's.
Still, it does appear to be a stretch.
Caveat: IANAL.
But my exes dad was, he was the head of the anti truct division of the justice department in Los Angeles for 15 years.
He had two seminal cases: 1) He beat Howard Hughes in court and 2) he was the guy behind US. Vs. Brown Shoe which I understand was a landmark case and is required reqading for anti trust lawyers today. Never mind Reagan gutted most anti-trust law.
To run afoul of the Sherman anti trust act you must control 2% of the total means of production of something. This is clearly not the case.
This is off the top of my head. Queue NewYorkCountryLawyer dude to correct me (as usual).
Need Mercedes parts ?
This case is being tried in Germany, so a different set of anti-trust laws apply than in the IBM case. The original case was brought by people involved in the gpl-violations.org project, who have a good track record of ensuring companies follow the principle of the GPL for products released in Germany. (IIRC, IANAL in Germany anyone can bring a copyright case to court, it doesn't have to be the actual owner of the copyright)
Content:
WPA supplicant
u-boot (boot loader)
libjpeg
linux kernel 2.6.9
curl
busybox
binutils
gcc
glibc
GPL vs Skype is being held in Munich, not in the US. And the GPL has been successfully tested at least once in Germany.
Your head a splode
ian
the judge ruled that violating the license didn't suddenly make it copyright infringement, merely contract violation.
Yes, but the Artistic License does not have a specific section that GPL does. The section states that if you don't comply with the terms of the license, your rights under the license are terminated. Then it becomes copyright infringement (although the infringement might be proven incidental later on).
In short, there's a crucial difference between those licenses, so you can't compare their cases.
Igb, I'm assuming that you're talking about the sources with this. As long as they're the sole copyright holder, they don't have to release the source for those changes, as they aren't a licensee of their own software. If I as the author of some GPL'ed software choose to release a binary-only version of that software under some other license with a feature not encompassed in the GPL release, I'm free to do so. I certainly won't get much standing in the community for it, but I am free to do it. MySQL had plans to do this before Sun reversed that path.
Only the copyright-owner is allowed to file a case. However, Harald Welte (author of things like IPTABLES) is german and head of gpl-violations.org.
"The eBay lawsuit against Craigslist isn't shaky at all; from everything I've seen, including their own admissions, Craigslist illegally diluted eBay's share in the company. I like Craigslist better than eBay, but I think they'll lose this one."
Got any links? Not being a wiseass - I'm interested in the case but haven't seen a whole lot of substantial information.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You don't know the alternative and call yourself a geek? Or, maybe an AC is no a geek!
The alternative is to use SIP phones. And then if you don't like one provider, you get another. For example,
http://les.net/
is one provider I've had experience with. But you can get lots more if you want,
http://www.sipcenter.com/sip.nsf/html/Service+Providers
With SIP you can use ANY provider and not waste money on substandard service. Heck, with SIP *you* can be your own provider with Asterisk PBX software.
There is probably more real phones available for SIP than the proprietary protocols like Skype,
http://www.grandstream.com/products.html
Very good phones from my own experience. Skype has been an obsolete VoIP solution for years now. Anyone seriously looking for a flexible VoIP solution, will only look at SIP.
It depends on how much stock a Munich court puts in US legal decisions. The Wallace case was a US case and according to TFA this one is in Munich. I know the US courts don't put that much weight in European decisions.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
In the GPLv2, the language was simpler: "You are not required to accept this license, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission..." It's completely clear. You accept the terms of the GPL as written, or you don't use the code. Period.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
You write a big app, release it GPL and sell products using it. OK, what happens next? You make changes, release under a diff license. Still OK, it's all your code.
You get the community's version of your app, with community updates. You release under diff license without source - hold on there, buddy. You're in violation of the GPL of the community's updates to your code.
You don't own that other code. If you want to duplicate their efforts with your own code that parallels community features, fine, burn yer money. You wanna benefit from other's GPL code added to yours - then comply with the license they used to release their code.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Why? Why would the copyright holder(s) be deprived of copyright?
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
This is a common myth and it's false. If the GPL was invalidated all the code would be owned by it's authors and thier would be no legal way for anyone to use the code without the authors permission. The only time something becomes public domain is after a very long time or if the Author intentionally and legally releases it.
according to this site (in German) the appeal has been withdrawn and skype has retreated with its tail between its legs.
...
until they take a few minutes to understand
it.
http://www.linux-magazin.de/news/
It seems - as usual - lawyers think they can beat down the "amateur made" gpl
Where does this nonsense come from, I wonder? If you put something under the GPL you still retain your ownership of it. All you do is you grant others certain rights on this something. If the GPL is ruled invalid, the somthing's legal situation is just as if the GPL had never existed: It is covered by conventional copyright law. Which means Skype were f*cked.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
That's not how it works.
Both Germany and the U.S. have ratified the Bern Copyright Convention (of sometime in the seventies), which made the default all rights reserved if there is no license, not public domain.
If a GPL term were found to be unlawful, it would be severed from the rest of the license, and the rest of the license would stand.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Actually SCO was not only laughed out of german court, they were asked to shut up or be fined for libel, because their statements was so absurd the court could only find them deliberately malicious.
The only precedence that matters in Germany is if the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany declares something unconstitutional, but this won't matter in the GPL vs. Skype case. Besides this every court decision isn't and shouldn't be affected by other courts' decisions directly. This is law and this is how it is in Germany.
Linking, even dynamic linking, doesn't get you off the hook if you distribute all of the pieces together and they don't work separately. It doesn't necessarily get you off the hook in other cases either (avoiding a long legal discussion).
However, the Skype code, at least the important part of it, isn't in the Linux kernel. It's a user-mode application and the GPL of the kernel doesn't apply to it.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
As reported (in german) by Linux-Magazin Online Skype has withdrawn its appeal during todays court hearing. After Skype presented its arguments, the presiding judge indicated the arguments Skype presented had severe weaknesses and Skypes chances were small. At that point Skype decided to withdraw its appeal.
By 'code' here, I assume that you mean 'source'. You can charge what you like for the runtime code, provided that you also ship the source.
If you do not provide another way of providing the source code, they you can charge no more than the reasonable cost of physically making a copy. Also, once three years are up from their last shipping of runtime code, the GPL licencees can charge what they like for the source.
The point isn't that the software is free-as-in-beer, but rather that any shipped software comes with the source, or else the source is easily acquired for the next three years, together with liberal hacking rights. Unshipped runtime code doesn't matter, whether for reasons of price or else any other reason, any more than undistributed code matters.
Wikileaks, no DNS
The GPL is *NOT* an EULA! It's a DISTRIBUTION license!!!
"The terms of the GPL prohibit charging for GPL code ever"
This is a horrible misconception.
You can charge whatever people will pay for GPL code.
You just can't sell it to them without also granting them the code and the right to redistribute. That's it. Nothing says no money may change hands.
This is the difference between "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer". GPL code is free as in freedom, not beer.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I wonder what they're going to do about Wallace v. FSF which already decided that the GPL does not violate any anti-trust laws?
IANAL, but it would seem that a court having already decided this exact issue would pretty much kill their case. Wallace lost on summary judgment, which means that the court in that case found that, even if everything he said was true (and that was doubtful), he could not prevail.
In other words, that claim is very likely to go nowhere, fast. The judge in the Wallace case was a well-respected anti-trust expert, too.
Bruce Perens.
I bought this phone at the "skype boutique" in the French version of the site several months ago. It did came with a paper leaflet saying that the phone contains GPL covered software and a CD-ROM with the sources of the linux kernel and many other packages (like wpa-supplicant). It is weird that they were still trying to fight this in court in Germany.
Here's the scoop from the man who made it happen, Harald Welte.
per http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html Does prelinking a GPLed binary to various libraries on the system, to optimize its performance, count as modification?
Why not quote something pertinent? The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License. But first, please read
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