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Another GPL win in Germany
The gpl-violations.org project has announced
that it has won a court case against D-Link in Germany. "On
September 6, 2006 the district court issued its judgement, confirming the
claims by gpl-violations.org, specifically its rights on the subject-matter
source code, the violation of the GNU GPL by D-Link, the validity of the
GPL under German law, and D-Link's obligation to reimburse
gpl-violations.org for legal expenses, test purchase and cost of
re-engineering." (Thanks to Atul Chitnis).
(Log in to post comments)
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 22, 2006 18:01 UTC (Fri) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] Am I alone in finding these battles hilarious?
I definitely don't want to belittle the great work Harald is doing, and I
I laugh because defendants are actually dumb enough to try and test the
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
I hope Harald continues to hold defendants to the GPL, because what I
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 22, 2006 18:51 UTC (Fri) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link] I laugh because defendants are actually dumb enough to try and test the GPL in court. They are not dumb - they are just slow. While FSF and Eben Moglen can and do avoid court battles Harald must go to court: if you've detected copyright infigment and sent note to the offending party then you must send case to the court in limited time - or you'll lose the right forever. This is difference between Germal and U.S. law. That's actually very-very-very good thing: this means if someone accidentally infringed you can not wait few years till your "intellectual property" is included in billions of devices around the world (thing LZW) - you must file everything promptly. But this also means Harald in a lot of cases is forced to bring the case to a court...
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 22, 2006 19:19 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] > if you've detected copyright infringement and sent note to the offending party then you must send case to the court in limited time - or you'll lose the right forever. This is difference between German and U.S. law.
Interesting. Does the same rule apply for patents? I.e. shall one file a case ASAP after discovering a patent infringement? If so it would be quite good protection against patent trolls.
copyrights .neq. patents Posted Sep 22, 2006 19:33 UTC (Fri) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] That's actually very-very-very good thing: this means if someone accidentally infringed you can not wait few years till your "intellectual property" is included in billions of devices around the world (think LZW) LZW is a bad example because it is a patent, not a copyright issue. You've fallen into the usual trap of the term "intellectual property", which sweeps up so many disparate kinds of law into a deceptive unity. Unlike patents, copyright infringement must be willful to some degree—you can't include someone else's code in your program without knowing that you are doing so. So, there is no such thing as a copyright that has been "accidentally infringed". (Unless you mean people who "accidentally" don't perform due diligence in checking that they have a proper license to use the code they are incorporating.) So, I'm not sure I agree that this is such a good feature of German copyright law.
copyrights .neq. patents Posted Sep 22, 2006 20:20 UTC (Fri) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] I'm not a lawyer (and not German, either), but I've watched what Harald is doing closely; you're misunderstanding the German law slightly (no surprises, as the parent poster to you is unclear about it too).The German law takes the view that you should start legal proceedings as soon as you become aware that someone is infringing your copyright. To encourage this, you may only obtain an injunction preventing the infringer from continuing to infringe within a short period of time (30 days IIRC) after you discover the infringement. However, all an infringer gains is the ability to continue shipping; damages can still be worked out by the court at any date. I'm not clear on the situation with a copyright holder who ignores infringements in the hope of building up damages; I believe that the court may choose to reduce damages in this case, to further encourage plaintiffs to come forward earlier rather than later. Note that the key date is not that of when the infringement took place, but the date on which the plaintiff first became aware that you were infringing their copyright; thus, if I had been selling Harald's code in Germany for the last 5 years without a suitable licence, making millions of euros in the process, but he only became aware of it today, the clock starts ticking today. The idea is to protect companies from a plaintiff who deliberately ignores infringements in the hope of increasing damages, while clamping down hard on infringers if the copyright holder complains swiftly. It also gives infringers an incentive to negotiate quickly; because the copyright holder has to take legal action shortly after discovering infringement to get an injunction preventing you from shipping product, you don't get very long to clear things up with them before you're in deep legal doo-doo.
copyrights .neq. patents Posted Sep 22, 2006 21:06 UTC (Fri) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link] Interesting...
If the starting date is when you discover the infringement, how do you prove what that date was?
Note, by the way, that no damages were awarded (as I read the news release), only costs plus an injunction against further shipping. Since the company had already agreed to stop shipping, it sounds like only the costs were at issue. While that is presumably because the project has not sought damages, it would be interesting to see an example of the analysis a court would use in trying figure out damages in a free software case. Are there any existing decisions that carried damages?
copyrights .neq. patents Posted Sep 23, 2006 7:15 UTC (Sat) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] If the starting date is when you discover the infringement, how do you prove what that date was? I presume that would be from the date that you served notice on them of the infringement.
copyrights .neq. patents Posted Sep 23, 2006 18:25 UTC (Sat) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link] Wouldn't that leave the same opportunity to let the damages build up before serving notice?
copyrights .neq. patents Posted Sep 24, 2006 12:33 UTC (Sun) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] Good point - I need more sleep.. :-)
copyrights .neq. patents Posted Sep 24, 2006 16:35 UTC (Sun) by jhardin (guest, #3297) [Link] Only for thirty days. So you can discover infringement and let it sit for a year, but you'll only be able to claim 30 days' damages, and that only by lying to the court about when you discovered the infringement. Do you *really* want to do *that*?
an obligation to mitigate damages is a standard part of common law Posted Sep 22, 2006 23:44 UTC (Fri) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] I'm not a lawyer either, but even in the US I believe the claimant has an obligation to mitigate damages by acting to stop the offender as soon as possible. This arises in many parts of the law (copyrights, tenant contracts, junk faxes, etc.). See, for example, here:Mitigation (also known as the doctrine of "avoidable consequences") holds that one cannot, once injured, ignore an opportunity to act so as to stem the continuing increase in damages from that injury, and recover the same from Defendant. (I seem to recall that this was raised as a possible defense in the SCO case, because SCO refused to mitigate its damages by telling the kernel developers what they needed to remove ASAP. Of course, this was before it became clear that SCO had no evidence at all.)
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 23, 2006 20:08 UTC (Sat) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link] Yeah well. There are people out there and businesses that no matter how many times you tellthem or how forceful you tell them the stove it hot.... they STILL have to touch it to be sure.
Stove is hot Posted Sep 26, 2006 18:09 UTC (Tue) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link] This is a feature, not a bug. Sometimes the stove isn't hot no matter what the conventional wisdom might say. Without the occasional crazy person we might never know. In this case I agree that the stove is hot indeed but the tendency to challenge authority is a good one in general.
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 23, 2006 17:55 UTC (Sat) by pcampe (subscriber, #28223) [Link] When I found a software which is a Linux based rescue disk for Windows systems, distributed in a violation of the GPL (no source code, and the full functional version is a commercial product) I remember of the GPL violation project, and wrote them to tell about this thing. It was more of one month ago, and I got only an auto-reply message. My email wasn't posted on the associated mailing lists. Some days ago, I wrote to the webmaster of gpl-violations.org, re-explaining the story, and still got no success.
I can understand how difficult is to work on this field, and I appreciate what they do. But I think they can find a way to better interact with people reporting possible violations of the GPL license.
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 23, 2006 18:40 UTC (Sat) by anonymous21 (guest, #30106) [Link] Try FSF license-violation@gnu.orghttp://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 25, 2006 7:08 UTC (Mon) by MKesper (guest, #38539) [Link] Harald Welte has only limited manpower, so he focuses on violations where code is in play he himself holds copyrights on. That's mainly netfilter / iptables stuff.
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 25, 2006 14:16 UTC (Mon) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link] I don't think [IANAL] he would have standing to sue if the product in question did not include material that he personally held the copyright on.
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 26, 2006 8:36 UTC (Tue) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link] We currently have 185 open tickets (i.e. reported GPL violations) at gpl-violations.org. You cannot expect us to respond to every case within the short time of something like a month. I have a dayjob (involves writing free software) that occupies already some 60-70hrs a week, I'm involved with may NGO's, I do free softwre in my spare time and next to all that I also do some GPL enforcement. Volunteers can answer to easy cases, but any kind of (legal or non-legal) action has to go through me. Thanks for your understanding.
Another GPL win in Germany Posted Sep 26, 2006 14:31 UTC (Tue) by pcampe (subscriber, #28223) [Link] >We currently have 185 open tickets (i.e. reported GPL violations) at>gpl-violations.org.
I'm not sure to understand of what you define as a ticket, as it seems to me that the only way to report a violation is a message on the mailing list, not a ticketing system.
>You cannot expect us to respond to every case within the short time of
I did not ask for a respond, I understand that an answer takes time and resources, my point it that my e-mail didn't get published in the mailing list as is still pending for approval, and this because I am not a mailing list member, not for legal reasons. I think that if the mail is published, you can get in touch with other people who use the same software and they might be of help in analyzing it, pressure the "author" and so on, otherwise is more a private conversation.
Surely, this kind of community may work differently than the average FLOSS one, it's more legal than technical, and this makes your work unvaluable.
But, please start to think if this is the best method to get critical mass, because when the-average-floss-advocate sees that the violations mailing list has about 5 mail per month he may think that there are not violations, and not need of help.
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