GPL Wins In French Court Case

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.

Comments

Not much in the article either.

[NoYob]

...an umbrella organization for adult education."

So they teach about porn?

Re:Sacre bleu!

[Chris Burke]

Ze GPL needs testing so badly. Zus far it has only been tested in ze legal depart'ments of business, and not in ze legal courts.

That first sentence is not really true, and not only because the second sentence is also untrue. The GPL may not have been tested extensively, but it has been tried in courts around the globe. But since there really isn't any reason no think that it would be ruled invalid, that testing isn't necessary. There's a reason it's been tested so few times -- all those legal departments, all those lawyers of various degrees of sleaziness, can find no basis on which to challenge it which they think would pass the judicial smell test. Even though they and their clients would have every reason to trump something up. The few that have tried to challenge the validity of the license have failed spectacularly.

That is, as the French say, "Le hint".

Re:Why?

[morgan_greywolf]

You're both almost right.

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

        a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
        b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
(rest of section 3 omitted since it's irrelevant here)

Empahsis mine.

Basically, edu4 could have either distribute the source with the binaries or accompany the binaries with a written offer to distribute the source to any third parties. (I suppose they technically could have done both and still be in compliance, but that seems rather redundant)

Re:What the hell? Crazy French!

[Aim Here]

It's an idiosyncracy of French law. The plaintiff here was a customer who did, yes, successfully sue for the source code. It probably couldn't happen in the US or UK.

FSF France's take on this finds this noteworthy:

"But what makes this ruling unique is the fact that the suit was filed by a user of the software, instead of a copyright holder. It's a commonly held belief that only the copyright holder of a work can enforce the license's terms - but that's not true in France. People who received software under the GNU GPL can also request compliance, since the license grants them rights from the authors."

Just when you thought the German courts were GPL-friendly, this shows up. Vive la France!

Backdoor

[phme]

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;
- [...]