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German Court Says GPL is Valid
Posted by
michael
on Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:29 PM
from the im-namen-des-volkes dept.
from the im-namen-des-volkes dept.
Axel Metzger writes "The Munich District Court has ruled on May 19, 2004 that the main clauses of the GNU General Public License are valid under German copyright and contract law. This seems to be the first judgment worldwide proofing the validity of the most popular free software license. The ruling is a confirmation of the preliminary injunction of April 2, 2004. The new judgment gives on 20 pages the reasons for the ruling. It states explicitly that the terms of section 2, 3 and 4 of the GPL are valid under German copyright and contract law. Here is the German text of the judgment; an English translation will be available soon. The judgment comes at the right time to fight those (SCO and others) who challenge the legal validity of the GPL in Europe and elsewhere. The lawyer of the plaintiffs, Till Jaeger from Munich should be granted the Free Software Award."
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Before partying.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Before partying.. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.alexhudson.com/)
Re:Before partying.. (Score:5, Informative)
in germany (as well as various other european countries) you can't give away all your rights on your work, in short "public domain" doesn't work, "signing over copyright" doesn't work.
so there definitely are differences.
(oh.. you _can_ put stuff into the PD, technically speaking: publish anonymously, leave no trace that it's been you.)
Re:Before partying.. (Score:4, Informative)
Just so no one is confused, GPL has nothing to do with "public domain" or "signing over copyright". It is a license that a copyright holder puts on the work.
True, however (Score:5, Interesting)
That's really why it works so well. If I make a work, it is copyright to me. By default no one other than myself has any right to distribute it at all. To do so, you need a license. The GPL is that license, but has provisions. You don't have to accept it, that's fine, but then you don't have a license to distribute. In no way are your rights infringed on, or copyright cricumvented.
Same thing applies to overall vailidity. If it's not valid, as SCO would like, that's fine, but then they, and anyone else, distributing GPL code are infringing on copyright since they have no license to do so. So if it's ruled invalid, it's a loss for them, espically since I imagine many bitter OSS people would go after them for copyright infringement as retribution.
This ruling is just a formal legal statement on that fact. A court has formally analyzed the GPL and come to the quite obvious conclusion: It's a legit license that obeys both the letter and spirit of copyright law.
Supposing it does go to court, I bet the ruling is the same in the US.
Very common misconception (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
It's quite conceivable that one judge would rule "against" one of the provisions of GPL for a very specific case, without invalidating the whole license. For instance: what if NVidia gets sued for not publishing their drivers under the GPL, and the judge does not consider their kernel module to be derived off the kernel ? Does that mean the GPL is invalid/unenforceable and NVidia used the linux kernel without a license? Hardly.
It's nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's nice (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Thursday July 15 2004, @08:46AM)
anyway, can't folks in the judicial system can still use this as 'precedent' in a way?
Re:It's nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's nice (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.tanningbeds4less.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 05 2006, @07:23AM)
IANAL, but technically, "yes and no". It can't be an actual precedent because a precedent is a prior ruling/interpretation on the SAME law, which isn't the case since it was a ruling on a German law. However, it can still be quoted by an attorney as previous ruling, to demonstrate that upholding the GPL is not so unusual and is "universal". The GPL isn't American or German, after all. The judge can do with that info as he pleases, consider or discard it. A smart judge would probably look at it and at least say "hmm".
My translation: (Score:5, Informative)
sorry for the messed up formating:
The open source project netfilter/iptables has won a huge success in the legal
battle against the router manufacturer Sitecom: With the decision of May 19,
2004 (Az. 21 O 6123/03) the Landgericht München [something like a district
court? R.] has confirmed the temporary injuction. Acording to this the
manufacturer Sitecom is prohibited to sell its WLAN routers until further
notice. Also the comparatively high amount of the dispute of Euro 100000 was
confirmed in the decision.
In the written opinion which was published on friday, it is clearly stated that
the judge considers the GPL valid for principal reasons. It says: "The
chamber shares the opionion that the conditions of the GPL can under no
circumstances be seen as an abandonment of copyrights and legal positions linked
to copyright." The sueing developer was legitimized to demand the rights
linked to the sourcecode
This makes it finally clear that the GPL model also works according to
German law", rejoiced Lawyer Till Jaeger, who represents the
netfilter/iptables project, in an interview with heise online. After this
"probably worldwide first decision on the validity and enforcability"
it was assured that the open source community defends itself. On the other hand
the Court has made it clear, that nobody has anything to fear if he plays by the
rules of the GPL
It is unknown if the router manufacturer plans furter legal steps. Jaeger's
client in the mean time found out that Sitecom offers one additional router
model (WL-111) with a firmware that infringes the GPL. A fine of 10000 Euro
because of infringement against the temporary injunction has already been
demanded, declared Jaeger
Truly a reason to rejoice, for Jaeger and for us!
American Courts (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.wormeyman.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday May 13 2006, @05:35PM)
Mr. McBride takes the stand... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://scottgant.blogspot.com/)
Darl McBride: No no! That's German for "The GPL, the".
Jury mumblings: Well, no one that speaks German can be evil! NOT GUILTY!
Awesome (Score:2)
(http://www.tuneforge.com/)
This is good news (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.jbryce.org.uk/)
The GPL is probably one of the least controversial copyright licences out there, and I would say it is totally watertight.
The only places where there might be problems are in countries like Iran which don't recognise copyrights from countries like the US. - if there is no copyright, there is no need to agree to the terms of the GPL to be allowed to use the software.
brings up a question (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://rush3d.com/reference/)
This is also a victory for good old RMS who has stated for years that the GPL is legally valid and binding.
This brings up an interesting question in my mind. Lets hypothesize for a moment that SCO loses all it's lawsuits and the GPL is proven in a US court to be valid and legally binding. How will future lawsuits dealing with violations of the GPL handled?
Are violators of the GPL going to have to pay fines or be forced to open source the code they designed in conjunction with GPL'd code. Add to this the possible stances the FSF could take on this issue.
This definitly makes things more interesting in my opinion.
Re:brings up a question (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://mysite.verizon.net/spitzak)
I have never heard of a copyright infringer being forced to lose rights to other IP of their own. I very much doubt anybody will ever be forced to open source code. This would be like saying the New York Times has to give away all copies of their paper from now on because one of their columns was plagarized. Such ideas are total nonsense, but are always brought up by the enemies of the GPL.
One part of confusion is that the infringer may choose to obey the GPL in exchange for getting the lawsuit threat dropped and to be able to continue distributing their product. But they were not "forced" by the GPL to do this. In fact, legally, it does not in any way get them out of their liability for the previous copyright violations (otherwise you could violate the GPL for years and then release the source code at the end as a "get out of jail free" card).
GNU GPL Conditions (Score:1, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 07 2004, @01:33PM)
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's
source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate
copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the
notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty;
and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License
along with the Program.
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and
you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you
distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based
on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of
this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the
entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest
your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to
exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or
collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program
with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of
a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under
the scope of this License.
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
It proves again that ... (Score:1, Funny)
Now we must hope that, as usual, everyone wants to be like Germany!
Germany says yes... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/)
Which means the US courts are almost certainly going to have to say "no". Could lead to an interesting case where in Europe Microsoft is a monopoly that has to change its trading rules, Linux is perfectly okay and SCO is a joke. Meanwhile in the US its Microsoft the good corporate citizen, Linux is illegal and SCO is Unix.
Start an orderly queue at the borders please gentlemen and start boarding those boats.
How important? (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday July 04 2005, @03:43PM)
Took long enough! (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.eadz.co.nz/blog/)
I guess it's a testament to the plain english and common sense language of the licence.
Me too (Score:2)
Damien
All I have to say is (Score:2)
Either Way... (Score:1)
Therefore, it might appear to be in many more peoples' and entities' interests that the GPL is ruled valid.
Some perspective... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.angelfire.com/il/macroman | Last Journal: Friday March 30 2007, @07:17PM)
Microsoft speaks against the GPL for this very reason - now the developers must reveal their source code, because it was based on GPL'ed code. But what they conveniently neglect to mention is that according to the EULA, a Windows developer cannot distribute, or even build, a derivative of Windows, under any terms . The license for GPL code covers only distribution of derivative products, whereas the MS EULA covers merely using the product. In fact, to even view the source code for an MS product requires that a developer agree to never develop a competing product!
Merely posting the source will allow these guys to continue to ship their product, but if they'd chosen the Microsoft development model, they'd owe royalties for every single product shipped!
Even though these guys might not like divulging their source code, they are still in a much better position than had they used Microsoft's code as a basis for their product.
somewhat related question (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.javaguy.org/)
I downloaded it, right? Even if it is just a '30 day eval'. Shouldn't they give me the source code?
isn't this '30 day eval' against the premise of the PGL anyway, that I should be able to redistribute the software I use?
Re:somewhat related question (Score:4, Informative)
(http://mysite.verizon.net/spitzak)
You can also redistribute it. Make sure you remove all the copyrighted material such as the SuSE logos and the installation program and help files, however. And make sure you remove any and all non-GPL stuff that you don't have a right to redistribute, such as Acrobat or any other such included programs. And you better recompile everything from scratch so you are sure their is nothing in the binaries that you don't have rights to redistribute. There are probably a lot of other rules, too.
Re:somewhat related question (Score:4, Informative)
It's also valid in Brazil (Score:1)
(http://www.geradorzero.com/)
why was there ever a doubt? (Score:2)
(http://www.xutopia.com/)
EU Wide? (Score:1)
what's with the time-delay? (Score:2)
(http://www.danielthompson.net/)
Take THAT, SCO! (Score:2)
Surely no one from Germany could be evil. Right?
GPL Valid? (Score:3, Interesting)
Its a bit like a Credit Card company providing a licence to someone that grants them the permission take anything they like they find in a shop without paying, on the condition that they deposit monies equaling that value into an account at some point later. Now, when some thief ends up in court for common theft, after nicking a load of stock, The thief claiming the Credit card companies licencing agreements with him are invalid, and can't be held up in court!.....
The GPL will be proven in a case of law when:
Person A , receives some software under the GPL, makes amendments to suit their needs, releases these changes to the world, as required by the GPL.
Person B, who makes software that competes with Person A (but this software also happens to be GPL'ed), Finds that there's this really neat piece of code done by person A, That will do wonders for his 'competing' GPL'd software, and so copies this code, line by line, into his product.... This product then becomes the market leader, no one wants to know A's product anymore!
Person A, isn't to happy with person B, and so sues A for copyright infringement. person B, then will have to rely on the GPL, to get themselves off the hook. At this point, if A can claim the GPL is invalid, then A has a case, however, by winning that particular case, they then leave themselves open to as similar copyright case by person C, who's software they original ripped off in the first place.
First DaimlerChrysler Wins Dismissal, Now This... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday December 11 2003, @11:03AM)
IANAL (Score:2, Funny)
For all of you who are wanting to post into this topic, I give you some "IANAL" so you won't have to bother yourself:
IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL IANAL
Just copy and paste 'em wherever needed, you are encouraged to actively put one of them into each paragraph of your posts.
Thank you for your cooperation.
You can get the router's source code from here: (Score:1, Informative)
http://www
Translation of Slashdot article (Score:1)
(http://www.squarefree.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 09 2003, @09:27PM)
Translation: 4 free karma points for the first translation!
ehm... just wondering (Score:2)
(http://www.marsdude.com/)
The GPL has more sections than 2 3 and 4... what about the other sections? If those are invalid, the GPL as a whole doesn't mean anything, right?
Look to reform instead (Score:1)
the weather (Score:1)
The Company (Score:2)
Name of parent company blacked out in German text (Score:2)
An immediate consequence of this judgment will be that Sitecome will not be able to market their offending router products in Germany unless they start complying to the GPL. There is an interesting twist to this case. The company that has been sued in Germany is named on Sitecome's website as distributor for Germany - they also happen to be a wholly owned subsidiary. They argued that since they do not produce but only sell and support the products that the issue should be brought up with there parent company and that they are in essence not responsible for sitecome.com's actions. This argument was dismissed by the court because they were the only one's listed for Germany on the website. This brings up the interesting questions would this judgment also apply to independent distributors of Sitecome's product who happen to be listed on their site? The way this judgment is worded I tend to believe the answer is yes - alas I am not a lawyer.
Summary (Score:1, Funny)
(http://www.majoros.net/)
Re:And the Germans finally did something (Score:1, Informative)
Re:How about we just grant him a cooler name... (Score:1)