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An injunction against Fortinet for GPL violationsAn injunction against Fortinet for GPL violationsPosted Apr 15, 2005 13:58 UTC (Fri) by bbigby (guest, #29308)In reply to: An injunction against Fortinet for GPL violations by chbarts Parent article: An injunction against Fortinet for GPL violations
I don't think that the DMCA will protect Fortinet under these circumstances. The problem for Fortinet is that the DMCA is for protecting copyright material of the rightful owner. In this case, Fortinet is NOT the owner of the GPL'ed software. Clearly, they are violating copyright law AND the DMCA does not apply in this case.
Even if you say, "Ah, but the DMCA protects the part of Fortinet's product that is theirs." Perhaps, but there is something in law, called "unclean hands." You cannot receive compensation for a loss when you have acquired gains from breaking the law. Besides, gpl-violations.org did not circumvent the protections in order to use the software. They did it to reveal GPL violations. I think that matters in the law. If gpl-violations.org had not found any violations, they would have quietly discarded the information that they acquired. None would be the wiser.
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An injunction against Fortinet for GPL violations Posted Apr 15, 2005 19:30 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Besides, gpl-violations.org did not circumvent the protections in order to use the software. They did it to reveal GPL violations. I think that matters in the law. It should. Since reverse engineering not for purpose of using the product is done every single day on millions of computers around the world! How ? Why ? Easy: anti-virus software. It does automatic reverse engineering of each and every program to catch "virus-like activity". If you'll think about it this exactly the same procedure copyright holder must do to catch copyright violation when code is obfuscated. And when automated procedure fails anti-virus companies continue with manual reverse engineering and then add more sophisticated algorythms in automatic version.
An injunction against Fortinet for GPL violations Posted Apr 16, 2005 8:16 UTC (Sat) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Excellent point.
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