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Telstra Violating the GPL?
daria42 writes "It looks like Australia's largest telco, Telstra, hasn't exactly been paying attention to its responsibilities under the GNU GPL. Australian coder Angus Gratton has been investigating the company's branded T-Hub, T-Box and T-Touch products — all based on Linux, and all without any source code or GPL license attached. Naughty. However, it's not as though Telstra is the only one to blame — the goods are manufactured by Sagem, Netgem and Huawei respectively."
Telstra responded quickly to Gratton's claims, saying they would work with the vendors to straighten out the licensing situation and fix any compliance issues.
Telstra should get a serious ass kicking over this. The amount of money they've spent on advertising alone for this product line wipes out any possible "we didn't know" excuse.
They had to have been told, by multiple lawyers, that this is happening.
If an ordinary person can get fined millions of dollars for minor IP violations, then a corporation the size of Telstra should be fined tens of billions for knowingly violating the GPL in a flagship product. But of course, the law is never fair.
In your analogy of Toyota distributing cars without following terms of the license, the dealer is NOT authorized to distribute under terms of the license. It becomes a copyright violation. The GPL is very clear about this.
The point is they don't need to agree to the license, the GPL never forces anyone into it (section 9). By not agreeing to the license, all normal copyright law restrictions apply to them. However in this case they aren't infringing copyright, they're merely abiding by first sale rule.
In fact a case can be made that apps that include a click-through EULA of the GPL violate the GPL. Since clicking I disagree will refuse to install the app which is an additional restriction (section 10). You can't force someone into the GPL, only pursue them for copyright infringement if they disagree.
Pursuing Telstra is stupid, they should be attacking the OEM manufacturers.
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