Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 9, 2025 18:05 UTC (Thu) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149)
In reply to: Source publication court-ordered? by cloehle
Parent article: SFC reports a successful (L)GPL suit in Germany

You find the court rulings at https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/avm.html
The ruling says "The defendant must bear the costs of the legal dispute because it has agreed to cover the
costs." So the court's decision didn't discuss the LGPL in any way since AVM handed over the complete source code and agreed to pay the costs of the dispute and thus provided everything the complaint requested (1. to surrender to the plaintiff the complete source code / 2. to reimburse the plaintiff for his extrajudicial attorneys' fees)

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 9, 2025 18:26 UTC (Thu) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link] (8 responses)

But it also means that their lawyers were of the opinion that they'd more likely than not lose anyway.

The German legal system doesn't rely on precedent much anyway, so not having an official ruling by the lowest court this can be tried in will not have any detrimental effect on future legal challenges. (Only if this had been appealed up to the highest courts in Germany would this have potentially had any legal impact on future rulings.)

But the fact that the lawyers of a fairly successful German company were of the opinion they'd lose the case here does set an implicit precedent on how other lawyers will advise their clients in the future.

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 9, 2025 20:22 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (7 responses)

> But it also means that their lawyers were of the opinion that they'd more likely than not lose anyway.

But it might instead mean that their lawyers and/or managers considered it a lower effort (and/or lower cost) to comply than to continue the lawsuit, independent of how likely they considered it that they would lose.

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 9, 2025 21:05 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (6 responses)

How much do (the royal) we care whether the compliance is from "we're good FOSS community members", "it's cheaper to work upstream", "it's cheaper to comply than to fight developers in courts", "it's cheaper to comply than to fight users in courts", or "the courts made us comply" beyond the decision of which companies are even on this spectrum to prefer when shopping for commodities? Hopefully companies tend to shift left on this spectrum over time, but I'd take a "our stuff is open because we were made to comply" over a closed-source vendor any day of the week.

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 9, 2025 23:09 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

We should care because lawsuits are a time consuming process, that cost money which is usually only reimbursed after you win. There are more useful things to be doing, like development. Outcomes are also better for everyone when development work is done upstream too. So we should prefer at least the first two options and work towards them. Hopefully some of these sort of lawsuits will start changing some of the incentives a bit, so that at least companies do the minimum compliance actions by default. Converting them to good FOSS community members will take more work of different kinds though.

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 9, 2025 23:47 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

I think the better scale to consider is not the "why does a company comply" scale, but rather "what is the cost to a user or developer of exercising their rights?".

The issue with "it's cheaper to comply than to fight in court" is that just getting to the point where the company is taking that decision costs me quite a lot of time and money. So the interesting scale is from "I can exercise my rights at low cost" to "I have to get a lawyer involved and pay to establish that I have rights, before eventually being reimbursed in full", through "I'll get my monetary outlay reimbursed, but no payment for the time and effort I put in", up to "I have to put time and money in, and may get nothing out".

That's especially true since the motivations of a company change as the employees change, and a company that was "good FOSS community members" 10 years ago may become "it's cheaper to work upstream" or even "legal says we must comply because it's cheaper to comply upon request than to fight in court", and return to being "good FOSS community members", without anyone particularly noticing. On the other hand, "it's easy and cheap to get compliance" versus "it's hard but cheap" versus "it's hard and expensive" is easy to follow from the outside.

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 10, 2025 6:45 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> but rather "what is the cost to a user or developer of exercising their rights?".

Indeed, thanks.

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 10, 2025 18:40 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Note that there are far more users than copyright holders, and it only need one to publish the source.
The copyright holder might be a college student, but one of the users might be a large company that enough money to start a lawsuit if they feel that could benefit their business.

This completely change the risk profile from the point of view of the offending company.

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 10, 2025 16:54 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

On the other hand, the cost to a user or developer will be low if the company is in compliance whenever they offer a product for sale, and they'll do that if their lawyers tell them that not being in compliance is an unnecessary legal risk. And this case suggests that it's now a big risk, because an attorney who can get Steck (or anyone else sufficiently knowledgeable) to identify a non-compliant product can get the fees they'd charge paid by the vendor without needing to do anything difficult or uncertain.

I think the fact that Steck was a user (rather than a copyright holder) of the device moves non-compliance from "you might have to pay money" to "an adversary can make you pay them money", which is where companies' lawyers start telling them they need to be in compliance before anyone notices.

Of course, that only gets as far as making it free for users and developers to exercise their rights, and culture matters as to whether the device comes with proprietary userspace software that can be aggregated into new firmware images by the build scripts but can't be modified.

Source publication court-ordered?

Posted Jan 11, 2025 21:23 UTC (Sat) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992) [Link]

While the end results might be similar, the intent and reasoning do matter from a legal stand point. I'm unfamiliar with how the German legal system functions, but were this in the US a mooted case* is not a case that can be referred to in the future to sway a decision. Without a clear ruling anyone's qualified opinion is as good as any other qualified opinion as to what the outcome would have been had it gone to trial. There's no way to know.

(*) Mooted cases are cases where the reason for the lawsuit no longer applies, so the case gets dismissed for no longer having a cause of action.