Examining an attack on the GPL

Examining an attack on the GPL

Posted Nov 25, 2003 8:19 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Examining an attack on the GPL by vblum
Parent article: Examining an attack on the GPL

It is not at all significant to read the GPL to deal with this situation.
In this situation, you've infringed on the original owner's copyright by
virtue of using it without a license (since you didn't accept the GPL,
and may not have actually realized you were offered the GPL). At this
point, the original owner can offer you any license (assuming the
original owner isn't under any particular obligations); this doesn't mean
you have to accept the license. Furthermore, there's no reason the owner
couldn't offer you the GPL at this point, having never done anything with
the GPL previously. If you refuse any license, it falls to the court to
determine a penalty, based on copyright law and not on the terms of any
license you might be offered, before or after the infringement.

In fact, there's no particular reason that, if Microsoft found that you
had violated the commercial licensing terms of some commercial code that
they no longer cared much about, they couldn't at that point offer you
the GPL, putting you in exactly the situation of having incorporated
GPLed code (and, if you didn't accept the GPL, there's no reason they'd
have to offer it to anyone else, either).

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