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Damages
Damages
Posted Dec 4, 2003 4:20 UTC (Thu) by andrel (guest, #5166)Parent article: The GPL Is a License, not a Contract
Prof. Moglen says:
A defendant found to have wrongfully included GPL'd code in its own proprietary work can be mulcted in damages for the distribution that has already occurred, and prevented from distributing its product further.
Why can't the judge decide forfeiture of the proprietary source code is the appropriate penalty? There are many programmers who would prefer this to a cash payment as compensation for the illegal use of their code. Their layers will certainly suggest to the court that releasing the infringing code under the GPL is an acceptable remedy.
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Damages
Posted Dec 4, 2003 7:15 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]
Why can't the judge decide forfeiture of the proprietary source code is the appropriate penalty?Because that is not one of the remedies for infringement set forth in 17 U.S.C. 504.
Damages
Posted Dec 4, 2003 17:23 UTC (Thu) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link]
But forefeiture is one of the remedies set forth in 17 U.S.C. 506. My question still stands.
Damages
Posted Dec 5, 2003 22:18 UTC (Fri) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]
Forfeiture of their rights to use the work they infringed upon. Not forfeiture of any of their own copyrights.