GPL upheld in France [LWN.net]

The FSF France has announced an appeals court ruling upholding the GPL. "In a landmark ruling that will set legal precedent, the Paris Court of Appeals decided last week that the company Edu4 violated the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) when it distributed binary copies of the remote desktop access software VNC but denied users access to its corresponding source code. The suit was filed by Association pour la formation professionnelle des adultes (AFPA), a French education organization." It is also interesting that the suit was brought by a group which does not hold copyrights in the software in question.

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GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 23, 2009 17:06 UTC (Wed) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link] (5 responses)

"It is also interesting that the suit was brought by a group which does not hold copyrights in the software in question."

I consider this a good thing and it would be good if this idea were to be generally applicable to copyleft Free Software no matter the country.

I mean, I get the idea that the person holding the copyrights is generally the one with standing, but in the case of licenses like the GPL, a party could be denying me something that I have the right to and that they are legally obligated to give me. I should be able to something about that. Especially if they got consideration from be for the binary but now want to deny me the rest of what they are obligated to give me and that I am due.

Are there any downsides to this that are not obvious. (Or obvious ones I am overlooking?)

all the best,

drew
--
Another Island And Another Woman (cc BY-SA song)
http://kompoz.com/p/12628

well the law is the law

Posted Sep 23, 2009 18:03 UTC (Wed) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

If the law says only the copyright holder can bring suit then only revising the law is the way to go, to give special consideration to public licenses like the GPL

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 23, 2009 19:30 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

As I said on Groklaw, why shouldn't an end user sue?

Certainly in Europe, if you're not covered by the exception, when you provide a GPL binary you are either:

(a) entering into an implied contract to supply the source on request

(b) a criminal.

That means there's a contract between supplier and recipient, and a right to sue.

Cheers,
Wol

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 23, 2009 22:44 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (2 responses)

Ah, but how do you know that a piece of software is not dual licensed by the author, making the distribution legal?

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 24, 2009 8:58 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

Because you wouldn't have received the GPL licensing terms with the software in such a case.

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 29, 2009 11:36 UTC (Tue) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]

> Because you wouldn't have received the GPL licensing terms with the software in such a case.

But they didn't anyway - it had been removed, as you'd expect from a deliberate license-violator.

However, there's nothing to stop you contacting the copyright-holder to alert him to your suspicions and to ask whether your vendor is dual-licensed and entitled to supply (a derived work? ) other than under the GPL. And once you establish that it's not dual-licensed, proceed to sue the vendor yourself, if the copyright-holder isn't bothered enough to do so himself.

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 23, 2009 20:38 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (3 responses)

I quickly read the ruling. Here a quick summary: The "standing to sue" issue has not been addressed. The court appointed an expert to look at the software and he found that:

the software (VNC) has been modified to hide the true copyright holders, thus it is counterfeit.
the software (VNC) has been modified to include a back-door, thus it is unfit for the stated purpose.

and the court basically conclude that the client has been ripped off by the vendor, so the issue was not decided on copyright law but on standard commercial law which should apply anywhere.

The most interesting point is the reliance on an expert that actually look at the software.

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 25, 2009 0:21 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

I also read the ruling. Indeed the court does not seem to care about copyrights here. This ordinary case is really about the (now bankrupt) EDU4 company delivering too late and lying to their customer in a number of ways - business as usual.

It is not even clear that EDU4 really tried to hide the GPL; it could be that they just did not know what they were doing and "forgot" to display the license. For their defense they claim that they would have finally done everything right if they had not been dismissed before the final deliverable, hahaha. (they were dismissed long after the deadline)

It is not clear either whether the hidden, hardcoded password was intentional or just (extremely) poor programming practice. In any case the security consequences seem to have touched a court's nerve.

By the way the contract was for setting up a number of classrooms (hardware + software).

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 26, 2009 6:19 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (1 responses)

The hidden hard-coded password must have been intentional - it's not just a mistake like failing to check the length of a buffer. Someone had to decide to put in a backdoor, and perhaps keeping this secret is why no GPL source was published.

GPL upheld in France

Posted Oct 3, 2009 23:31 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> The hidden hard-coded password must have been intentional - it's not just a mistake like failing to check the length of a buffer. Someone had to decide to put in a backdoor

Or someone might have decided to hardcode a password only for convenience, and then hide it just for "security". It does not mean they planned to actually use it as a backdoor. Skype is doing something like this (in a more elaborated way), and no one brought them to a court yet.