GPL Lawsuit May Not Settle 285
A number of readers wrote in to inform us that contrary to earlier indications, it's no sure thing that the lawsuit alleging GPL violation by Monsoon Multimedia will get settled out of court. Linux.com now reports that the SFLC's legal director Daniel Ravicher has stressed that no agreement has been reached: "Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance." (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of Sourceforge, Inc.)
Oh yeah (Score:2)
Re:Oh yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Oh yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL, but the way I understand it, lost revenue is often difficult to prove. In cases where it can be established that the offending party knew that it was violating copyright and willfully did so anyway, however, the court can require payment of statutory damages (which can be much higher than any revenue the plaintiff might have actually lost). The only glitch here is that I was under the impression that you needed to have registered your work with the Copyright Office in advance in order to claim statutory damages.
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It may be that it is so difficult to win without registering, it has become a defacto standard. I don't know. But I or anyone for that matter could just claim that the original versions they found on the Net had a BSD license and they were shocked to discover that it was GPLed instead. They could claim their lack of compliance with the terms of the GPL was becau
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Registration is a pre-condition for litigation. Furthermore, registration prior to violation is a pre-condition for statutory damages.
hawk, esq.
Wrong on two counts... (Score:2)
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Patent infringment also has two different levels of infringment. But so do copyrights. Copyright and patent laws tend to have quite a few similiarities. The (3x?) may have been based on patent and not copyright law.
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I'm not sure about that. If you mean that the Copyright Act of 1976 (which was 30 years ago) removed some old requirements for copyright (like putting the circle-C on the work) then you're right ... but my understanding was that there were still additional benefits to actual registration where it came to the damages you could claim in court. That is, you can certainly still WIN a copyright case without registering, but my
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If I recall (it's been a couple of years), it was all within the realm of the Uniform Commercial Code, which would mean such statutes exist in most (if not all) states in largely-unmodified form.
In this reading, I learned that all valid contracts have to abide by certain rules (otherwise, they are invalid and null). Chief among these requirements is
Re:Oh yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess you have consideration. What about the offer and acceptance? Do you really have an exchange of promises?
A license is not a contract. It is more a one-sided offer of permission to do something that would, without the license grant, be illegal. A license can have restrictions.
The idea with the GPL is it has restrictions. The logic is that if you don't comply with these restrictions then you never had the right to distribute. And in the case of a copyrighted work, if you redistribute without ownership or a license, and you do it willfully, then you are liable for 3x the statutory damages.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=212176&seqNum=3&rl=1 [informit.com]
That's the theory anyway. I guess we'll see.
-- John.
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>I guess you have consideration. What about
>the offer and acceptance? Do you really have
>an exchange of promises?
However, the term license is often used for cases were there IS a contract or is part of a contract or as part of the naming of the contract and so on. Which of course causes confusion.
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As I understand it from reading Slashdot, the "loss of revenue" and "copyright infringement" arguments are essentially bullshit when the *AA uses them. So how is the SFLC (nee the FSF) any different?
When this story broke a few days ago I theorized that they were more than entitled to try to get this company to comply with the license. Maybe even make them donate money to Busybox. Heck, even try to get an injunction to make Mons
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There's also a c
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As I understand it from reading Slashdot, the "loss of revenue" and "copyright infringement" arguments are essentially bullshit when the *AA uses them. So how is the SFLC (nee the FSF) any different?
They aren't inherently bullshit arguments. The problem is with the *way* the RIAA uses them, not with the concepts themselves.
But damages? For copyright infringement and loss of revenue?
Compensatory damages would make no sense, obviously. But there are statutory damages and perhaps even punitive damages that the court could toss in there.
More likely, though, the FSF will simply want the court to enforce the termination language in the GPL, and bar Monsoon from distributing Busybox at all. Then, if Monsoon wants their permission to distribute Busybox to be r
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Copyright material is covered by copyright law, as you say. You cannot copy copyright material without permission - i.e. a license - from the copyright owner. The GPL is a license to copy, subject to various restrictions. Without it, copyright law says you
Gotta cost something (Score:2, Interesting)
All profits from this product could be re-invested to projects or project maintainers to create better OSS products and services in a closely related area.
They pay a penalty now, but can redeem themselves by building a partner network.
Someone needs to write up a website with what you can and can't do (in plain english - with case studies) with various free so
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I believe your answer to number 3 is wrong according to MySQL AB (the corporation that owns the copyright of MySQL). They changed from the LGPL in version 2.x to GPL in version 3.x. See http://mmmysql.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]. I can't find the page right now, but at the time all this changed it was fairly clear that MySQL was tired of losing the licensing fees. Because the Connector was LGPL, you could embed MySQL in virtually any application and never need to purchase a license. The LGPL had little burden on
The Meaning Of Compliance (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, that wouldn't bring you into compliance. After all, what about the GPL code you already distributed? You still have to give the source code for that!
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Care to provide any reasoning to back up that unsupported assertion?
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Just so we're on the same page here, are you saying that for distributing a derivative work without a license that the court is going to demand that you comply with a lic
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No, but that's because no license which specified that source code had to be revealed has ever been tested! And anyway, I'm not a lawyer. Instead, I'm trying to argue this from the perspective of simple common sense, which seems to be woefully lacking in the legal world!
Here's a simple question: when the company does stop distributing, how do the copie
SFLC wants GPL tested in court... (Score:2)
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Maybe this is what Eben Moglen meant when he said [geof.net]:
Now, as usual, when you win a small tactical engagement that turns out to be a large strategic victory, you have to consolidate the gains, or the other side will take them back. So we are now moving into a period in which what we have to do is to consolidate the gains. We have to strengthen our own understanding about what our community can do.
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I think this is unlikely, and a cash settlement would be a step backwards for the FSF. Let me use a portion of your own quote:
when you win a small tactical engagement that turns out to be a large strategic victory, you have to consolidate the gains, or the other side will take them back.
Let's look at some recent strategic victories for the FSF:
1. Microsoft have publicly dissociated themselves from the GPL3, and reworded their prior contract with Novell.
2. Even under the GPL2, a company that knowingly disrtibutes code in violation of the GPL is liable for penal
While they're at it... (Score:2)
hypocrite much? (Score:3, Insightful)
how the fuck can they make this claim, yet when SCO filed it's complaint, the open source community's response was "all we have to do is fix the infringment" - the very same claim now being denied.
you can't have it all your own way.
Re:hypocrite much? (Score:5, Insightful)
SCO was more of the opinion "We'll tell you what you're violating in court" without giving Linux a chance pre-lawyers.
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Assume the offending portions of code in 'Linux' are explicitly pointed out - i.e. 'Linux' is given a chance - the 'Linux developers' work around that code with new code, and call it a day. Then they were still in violation in the past.
Isn't that the same as what's being said here? They informed a developer that they were violating the GPL, silly potential legal a
I am tagging this... (Score:2)
If you mess with the gnu... (Score:4, Funny)
If that quote is correct (Score:2)
some more quotes .. (Score:2)
I see, acting to assure compliance with the GPL is acting 'childish'. As to your erroneous claim that no-one would notice - I don't think so.
' Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient [linux.com] to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance '
--
morning shift
was: Re:If that quote is
http://gpl-violations.org settlements (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe... (Score:2)
Following GPL is punishment? (Score:3, Funny)
So what do they expect to actually get? (Score:4, Interesting)
- Injunction to stop infringing copyright
- actual damages
- profits from the infringement
- attorney fees
- anything else the court might want to do
As soon as the defendant complies with GPL, they aren't infringing, so #1 isn't a big deal.Actual damages? That's a big fat zero.
Profits? At this stage in the product's life-cycle, defendant probably isn't profitable yet, so that's likely to be another big fat zero.
Attorney fees. Finally something that might actually be non-zero!
I don't see much punishment happening here. They'll settle for attorney fees and some nice (to the developers) but insignificant (to the company) payment.
Simply not enough? (Score:3, Informative)
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today is my birthday also.
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Do you want to give us some reasons for your belief, or should we take your word on faith?
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There, fixed that for you. If you agree that parties like the RIAA and MPAA are wrong, deceitful, and unfair when they mislabel copyright infringement as "theft" or "stealing" -- and you should agree -- then you shouldn't
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The problem with RIAA is that they try to sue people who didn't infringe their copyright.
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They simply didn't make the modified sources available.
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Just because you pay the bill for your land line in arrears, doesn't mean the telephone company can't take action if you go ringing people in India, Botswana and Malaysia and then decide not to pay for the calls! And taking a paper from the railway station newsage
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Re:Expenses (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine Microsoft wanted to use some code that is published under the GPL. It doesn't really make a difference, but we can imagine that Microsoft has money in the bank, and wouldn't do something obviously illegal.
Microsoft has two choices: Use the code and follow the rules of the GPL license, or find the copyright holders and offer them money for a proprietary license. If they go the second route, unless the copyright holders for some reason refuse any business with Microsoft, there will be an agreement in the end where Microsoft will pay a certain amount to the copyright holders.
If someone else just copies the code and then doesn't follow the rules of the GPL license, the fair market value determined by our Microsoft thought experiment would be the damages. That would likely be tripled for punitive reasons (otherwise a company could just steal anything, if they didn't get caught they'd be fine and if they got caught, they would only pay what they owed anyway).
And there is real precedence, like Apple first paying for a proprietary license to CUPS and then buying the copyrights to CUPS.
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ROFLMAO... (Score:2)
If you want people citing legal precedent plus discussions of interesting, possibly viable legal theories- interspersed with at
at least a little of the same poo flinging you find around here on
Re:ROFLMAO... (Score:5, Funny)
THIS IS
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You forgot to kick CowboyNeal into a hole.
Re:Damages? (Score:5, Informative)
The registration of a copyright is not required for a work to be copyright, it just has to be registered prior to filing suit. Doing so early on is a good idea as it makes it easier to defend in court, but it is definitely not compulsory to do so.
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hsc [copyright.gov] Has plenty of relevant information. As well as:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#cr [copyright.gov]
Re:Damages? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You could place a value on the code coming back out from changes but you might want to be careful there with all the tax the Internet talk we see every so often. It would really suck if multiple countries found that the contributions back were worth billions of dollars and taxed each contributer or copyright holder accordingly. They already do this to some extent with the Amish barter systems in america where they trade a liv
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How would a software project, which gets modified extremely frequently, accomplish that anyway? Wouldn't you have to continually re-register after every CVS commit, as every new version is a new derivative work of the old?
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Excuse me, but this is bunk... (Score:5, Informative)
if you fail to abide by the terms of the license grant for the protected Work(s) you are using, you
can expect to get your ass sued at some point if it is found out that you're doing it.
It doesn't matter if it's GPLed.
It doesn't matter if it's MIT/X11 licensed.
It doesn't matter if from Microsoft under an EULA or one of the Shared Source licenses.
If you breach the terms of the licensing, you're guilty of breaking at least a civil contract if not
outright Patent or Copyright infringement- PERIOD.
There's no 'intricacies' involved with OSS in the first place- they're simpler licenses to follow.
I'd be leery of dealing with anyone selling proprietary anything these days because of those 'intricacies'
that are ALWAYS present with most proprietary products.
Name of the game: Don't Cheat. Don't Get Greedy. Abide by the license terms, whatever they might be.
Copyright notice and Creative Commons licenses? (Score:2)
There's no 'intricacies' involved with OSS in the first place- they're simpler licenses to follow.
What's so simple about the Creative Commons licenses, which allow an author to forbid, after the fact, downstream distributors from including a proper copyright notice on a work? See section 4(a) of the Creative Commons Attribution License [creativecommons.org] about removal of credit. Such a requirement appears impractical and makes the Creative Commons licenses incompatible with a lot of other licenses.
Creative Commons isn't an OSS license. (Score:3, Insightful)
The very points you raise may be why it has not met with OSI approval, but there I'm speculating.
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Re:Excuse me, but this is bunk... (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? Please take the GPL Quiz [gnu.org] and tell us what score you got. Hint: it's surprisingly tricky!
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But I find that rather amusing. I mean, it's not like the liability or damages would be less if you somehow ('accidentally' ?) shipped proprietary software (binary or source) with your product. In fact, I imagine a proprietary software vendor would be even less forgiving than the FOSS community. It's not like FOSS is demanding greater vigilance than proprietary
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All it takes is one unscrupulous developer- or a batch of abjectly clueless business people to cause one of these messes.
To them it's all by magic and they "own" everything they do. I see it all the time.
If you want, blame the business schools and all for graduating people that haven't been taught a lot of these things
and are taught silly, useless "business optimization" things like Six Sigma that're only really use
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I agree, there's a huge lack of basic legal knowledge among non-lawyer workers. For example, just the other day I had to warn my girlfriend, who is an artist working at a computer game company, that the fonts available at all those "free font" websites might not actually be free to use when embedding the code of the font in the game itself (as opposed to using the vector or raster data output from the font "program"
I say: scar'em (Score:2)
That's exactly what they should be thinking: "I will get sued if I violate the GPL. So, I better dot my i's and cross my t's."
They should be as scared of that as getting sued about violating any commercial license.
Kind of a stupid Post.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Jeepers! I feel much stupider having read that. The GPL is a software license. It can't hold an opinion on the old order [wikipedia.org] following the French Revolution.
and they could declare the GPL to be in violation of anti-trust, unconstitutional because it is non-commercial
Anti-trust? WTF? Non commercial? You can use the GPL license to cover commercial software all you like. Do you have any understanding of the issues here?
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Extra points if you don't come away looking like a complete idiot.
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Anyways, Her comment was on how important the nominations process was and what it meant to Americans. She said that they can't just have any judge on the supreme court ruling things un
the sooner the better (Score:2)
I mean, what can happen?
SCOTUS can invalidate the GPL. So, nobody has a license, and the authors will just release a new license.
Or SCOTUS can declare that all GPL'ed code is public domain now. So, the BSD guys are really happy, and the GPL projects will simply put all new code under a new license.
What's the big deal?
OTOH, the sooner we know, we can act.
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You say "Does an admittedly left leaning GPL..." I want to know who "admit[ted]" that the GPL is "left leaning," and when. Don't cite me RMS's opinions on other matters, or the lifestyle of FLOSS users, or any other ad hominem red herrings. Tell me, specifically, whose admission you are referring to.
Otherwise, I will file you (and any further arguments you may wish to make) next to people who misuse the word "literally," cannot distinguish between "to" and "too," and believe that quotati
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I asked for a specific admission. You have not cited one. If you want to say there are overtones, leanings, implications, that's fine. "Admitedly," as used, is a pejorative, and as such, is open to challenge.
But note that he does not believe, per se, in copyright law.
On the contrary, the GPL is specifically
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The central thrust of the Free Software philosophy in general is that the inability to modify and share software and hardware is bad. To avoid this, instead of exchanging money for software, we exchange the promise of continued ability to modify for software. While it may seem like socialism to someone
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What they don't further understand is that it's not covered BY the UCC at all, even if it was for pay.
It's covered under Copyright law- it's a reproduction and derivative works license grant, which confuses
the HELL out of anyone unfamiliar with producing Protected Work(s) or protecting them. They're used to
EULAs and the lot. They're not used to the types of license grants that authors give publishers, et
Re:Kind of a stupid strategy... (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, if two people negotiate a license agreement that says A can distribute B's book so long as B pays A 15% of the gross receipts, it's clear that the license makes the grant and that the payment is a secondary obligation. If there was non-payment, B would sue A for breach of contract but would have waived the right to sue for copyright infringement.
The GPL is much more complex because it is non-commercial. The "payment" in the form of reciprocation, yet it's written such that the "payment" is a condition precedent to the grant of rights rather than a secondary obligation. Also, there is no agreement between the two particular parties to the GPL.
There haven't been enough cases close to the GPL to figure out exactly what the rule is. The general rule is that things outside of copyright (such as payments) are secondary obligations, not conditions precedent but things inside of copyright (such as selling just film rights) are conditions precedent.
So if I license you to make a movie out my book and you have to pay me $1 million, if you don't pay me, that's a breach of contract. If you sell copies of my book, that's copyright infringement.
If the GPL is read as a license that waives the right to sue for copyright infringement, that would leave only the ability to sue for breach of contract. If the only penalty the contract allows is loss of license, it's not clear what happens. Do you get back the right you waived? The whole GPL then becomes self-referential. "I waive the right to sue you for copyright infringement so long as you give me the right to sue you for copyright infringement."
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How could one read that one?
You don't waive the right to sue for Copyright infringement with the acceptance of the terms.
You get the right to distribute the Protected Work(s) and make Derivative Protected Work(s) (Also covered by the same license)
as long as you abide by the terms- which is you give access to the source code to the original and any derivative
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"Generally, a 'copyright owner who grants a nonexclusive license to use his copyrighted material waives his right to sue the licensee for copyright infringement and can sue only for breach of contract. If, however, a license is limited in scope and th
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No, it's not. The contract granted the right to make the movie. Copyright law does not include any right to $1 million, that's coming from contract law.
If the gist of your copyright claim is that the person violated the terms of the license, r
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...aren't going to find anything here to change their minds.
When you hear people like Linus talk about the license (the good ol' GPL v2, that is), it sounds very reasonable - I gave you code, so you have to give back what you went on to accomplish with it. Except that it's not enough to post Linus (or whoever the original programmer was) a CD with your latest and greatest; you have to provide convenient source code access to anyone who ever received your software, for every version that you ever distributed, for years. If you have a serious customer base, even if those "customers" are getting your stuff for free, this requirement is neither easy nor cheap. Better take it seriously though, because the FSF has shown it intends to come down hard on those who fall short.
And we're not even talking about GPL v3 here.
If you read the gpl (v2) you would realize its not that hard:
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I've heard a lot of arguments against the GPL, but come on, it's not easy or cheap to make your GPL'd source available? That takes the biscuit. All it needs is a tiny bit of paper in the box with your product, or a single file on the disk that says we make our source available at this URL...
Even a shared server would be fine forserving single files - a $20/month hosting agreement could serve the tarballs for all but the biggest files. There are other options for
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Forcing a company to settle for damages out of court can be almost as worthy as winning an intense court battle, but happens settlements are a lot qui
Re:Is this really different from the RIAA or MPAA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Using GPL software without complying with the GPL is a liability for any business. As is using any proprietary software without complying with the license that comes with the software.
But what would compel a company to support FreeBSD when they could just take the code, use it for their own needs, and never make upstream contributions?Re: (Score:3, Informative)
More correctly, distributing GPL software without complying with the GPL is a liability for any business. The GPL only covers distribution, not use. Everyone is perfectly free to use GPL'ed software without any restrictions whatsoever.
Re:Is this really different from the RIAA or MPAA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Using any licensed intellectual property without complying with the appropriate license is a liability for any business, and they know it. The difference here is that there is a perception in business that Open Source projects are operated by dirty hippies that don't have it "together" enough to do anything about it (nor the money, even if they did have it "together").
This is why it's important for this suit to move forward with an objective of some type of damages and at least attorney fees. This will send the message to business that there are repercussions to ignoring or trying to circumvent Open Source licenses like the GPL.
The only businesses that will be scared off from using Open Source because of this are dishonest businesses that shouldn't be allowed to use Open Source anyway
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(Easier to sync with the open version and get new features and if you can just use the open one and support it yourself and others use and develop for it aswell it will become better.)
But if they don't like it they are free to not submit any changes back aswell of course, and there are no troubles with that either.
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Penalty for your distribution of misinformation about this on Slashdot: To compensate, you have to post the correct information - BSDs get contributions back from their derivates - at least 10 times. This will, hopefully, dispel the damage you ahve done by publicly supporting the incorrect meme.
Eivind.
The stupidity tax vs. Helping the competition (Score:3, Insightful)
> it for their own needs, and never make upstream contributions?
When the Netscape codes was released (as Mozilla), they claimed that "the stupidity tax" would prevent this. The stupidity tax is the extra effort you have to take to re-port your proprietary additions to each new release of the base code.
Isolated, I believe the stupidity tax is enough to make it worthwhile to contribute your additions back, at le
Re:Is this really different from the RIAA or MPAA? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that infringing other people's copyrights is a bad business move. It does not matter at all what mechanism the rightsholders are using to protect their copyrights.
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