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Strong Court Ruling Upholds the Artistic License
dilute writes "The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (an authoritative court that normally deals with patent law), has issued a strong ruling (PDF) upholding the Artistic License in a copyright dispute between the developers of the Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI), and Kamind, a company that used portions of DecoderPro to develop a competing product. The product at issue was DecoderPro, an open source project released on SourceForge under the Artistic License, for interfacing with model railroad control chips. Kamind used a number of DecoderPro files in developing its product, Decoder Commander. However, Kamind did not comply with the Artistic License in a number of respects, including attribution, copyright notices, tracked changes or availability of the underlying standard version." Read on for more, below.
Dilute continues: "The lower court denied relief, saying that the Artistic License merely imposed 'contractual' promises, and that a violation did not constitute copyright infringement (any contract-based relief would probably have been meaningless). In a strong ruling, the Federal Circuit found that the Artistic License is legally enforceable, that its terms constituted 'conditions' for reliance on the license, and consequently that a violation of those conditions would put the violating product outside the license and thus make the violator a copyright infringer, potentially liable for an injunction. The case lays out a clear and compelling description of the rationale for open source, and reflects a complete willingness by the court to lend the force of law to these licenses."
Reader ruphus13 point to Lawrence Lessig's commentary on the ruling; Lessig calls it "huge and important news," and notes that the reasoning is generalizable to the GPL and other Free software licenses, as well.
>or is a legal distinction made between license for personal use vs. license for redistribution?
Yes, there is such a distinction from the start -- copyright protects distribution, not use.
You need a specific contract if you want your license to speak to use. For distribution, you
reserve all rights under copyright law, license or no license.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Traditionally, copyright owners sold their copyrighted material in exchange for money. The lack of money changing hands in open source licensing should not be presumed to mean that there is no economic consideration, however. There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties.
This too:
The copyright holder here expressly stated the terms upon which the right to modify and distribute the material depended and invited direct contact if a downloader wished to negotiate other terms. These restrictions were both clear and necessary to accomplish the objectives of the open source licensing collaboration, including economic benefit... Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material.
Good to know the court system can still work!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
It's not even just that: Katzer also went and got patents over the concepts expressed in JMRI, which were only granted because he failed to disclose JMRI's prior art to the patent office, and then sued the JMRI people for infringement of their own code!
The open source guys didn't even start this; Katzer did. He brought it upon himself!
JMRI has a long and detailed page describing what happened. I highly recommend everyone reading it; it's amazing how brazenly this prick Katzer (and his lawyer) tried to rip everybody off.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Rights that are asserted under copyright, are not surrendered based on any money changing hands.
You have two concepts confused: Rights are reserved, not granted, but contracts require consideration.
I think you have the ideas of a "License" and a "Contract" conflated. A contract is not valid without
consideration (e.g., "money changing hands"), but rights are reserved by default.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"You" is you, if you're thinking about copying or distributing this Package.
That reads like someone tried to satirize the "legalese" present in most licenses rather than create a working license for themselves. Also, the license is automatically binding for anyone who is thinking about using the license? Compare to a Creative Commons license, where
"You" means an individual or entity exercising rights under this License...
You'd think programmers would know better than to let ambiguities like that by. (And incidentally, some people have similar concerns about the language in the GPL: it has a conspicuous lack of "legalese", which might make it easy to read, but also risks ambiguity popping up in a court case down the road.)
It's not stronger copyright law, it's just common-sense upholding of contracts.
JMRI offered a license which overrides copyright law and Kamind violated the terms of that license. The court is saying that when Kamind broke the terms of the license, the copyright-defying activities that the license allowed, were no longer allowed.
If I offer to trade you a moon rock for a pint of ice cream, and you don't give me a pint of ice cream, then you don't get my moon rock. Kamind wanted to take the moon rock anyway, and then say, "Don't like it? Then sue me for the value of a pint of ice cream! Nyah nyah!" JMRI says, "No, I'm suing you for the value of my moon rock."
It's not stronger copyright law, the way copyright works has not changed at all, it's just an already existing copyright being honoured by the federal court, after for some reason a lesser court refused to honour it. I could probably explain better if I RTFA but we all know that's not going to happen.
The judge in this case corrected a blatant error by the District Court.
Like the GPL, the Artistic License basically says "You can copy this software provided you do X, Y and Z". The correct interpretation of this license is: If I do X, Y and Z then I have the right to copy the software. If I don't do X, Y and Z, then I have no right to copy the software, and copying is copyright infringement, and courts will stop me from doing it if the copyright holder asks them. The wrong interpretation, used by the District Court, was: I have the right to copy the software. I am also obliged to X, Y and Z, and if I don't do them, then the copyright holder can sue me to do X, Y and Z or pay damages. However, the copyright holder cannot stop me from copying. As I said, this has now been declared the wrong interpretation.