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GPL Wins In French Court Case

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the here-come-the-jokes dept.

viralMeme writes "An appeals court in Paris has upheld the ruling from a lower court, which found that the French firm Edu4 had violated the GNU General Public License (GPL). The plaintiff was the French Organisation Association francaise pour la Formation Professionnelle des Adultes (AFPA), an umbrella organization for adult education." The basic charge was the removal of copyrights and such from VNC source code, and not distributing it.

3 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Re:French, eh? by Noryungi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Very funny... NOT.

    Just remember that the recent HADOPI 'three strikes and you are out' law can -and will- be challenged in front of the French Constitutional Court, which will probably strike it down as un-constitutional and contrary to human rights.

    Which is a big relief, at least for me (being French and all that).

    --
    The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
  2. Backdoor by phme · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the text of the decision, it appears that the provider (Edu4) had not only removed GPL copyrights from VNC, thus making the product likely to be considered counterfeit, but also introduced a backdoor

    Considering that Edu4 [...]
    - modified VNC protection mechanism by introducing a non-modifiable password known only from Edu4, thus allowing Edu4 to take control of any workstation, bypassing the protection mechanism Edu4 delivered;
    - did not mention any of this to AFPA;
    - [...]

  3. Re:French, eh? by Balinares · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would very much not count on this. The rewritten law is designed to route around the Conseil Constitutionnel's earlier objections.

    Now the convictions will have to be signed off by a judge using the ordonnance pénale procedure, which is, if I got it correctly, the procedure used to deliver, for instance, driving-related fines. The gist of it: a cop has no right to sentence you to anything, only a judge can, but it's assumed that if a cop directly witnessed you speeding then you're as good as guilty and a simplified, faster procedure is thus used; that's the ordonnance pénale. You can challenge the ruling, in which case it goes to a regular court.

    So is this procedure appropriate to the case of copyright infringement? Hell no. To start with infringement can be witnessed as coming from a given IP address, not an identified person, making those cases immensely less clear cut than common driving-related offenses. But does that make it unconstitutional? Nope, I don't think. My bet is that the law will likely stand as such.

    The law tries to brain-damagedly route around the lack of direct IP to person mapping by making the owner of the Internet account legally responsible for everything that happens on it. I'm not sure of the constitutionality of that, but I'm afraid it may stand too, ill-thought patch job that it is. Meaning the death of open access points.

    So I wouldn't be optimistic.

    All this because the French president's trophy wife is a singer. The mind boggles.

    --

    -- B.
    This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.