JMRI case settled

[Posted February 19, 2010 by corbet]

Andy Updegrove reports that Jacobsen v. Katzer (the JMRI case) has been settled on terms which uphold the enforceability of free software licenses in the US. "With the case now settled, there can be no further appeals - meaning that the rulings of the District and Appeals courts are now binding in their circuit. Although federal courts in other circuits will not be bound this court's decision, the California circuit is well respected, and other federal judges nationwide will be influenced by its legal conclusions. As a result, the results of the Jacobsen v. Katzer could eventually become the law of the land."

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JMRI case settled

Posted Feb 20, 2010 12:30 UTC (Sat) by farter (guest, #62197) [Link] (1 responses)

"3. The removal of the copyright and authorship data contained in the pirated code was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, thus providing a basis for suit for that action in violation of the JMRI license."

This is rather interesting :)

JMRI case settled

Posted Feb 25, 2010 1:53 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link]

From http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/History.shtml :

> We included a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You might wonder what DMCA has to do with open source software. DMCA has two main statutes. Section 1201 is the one which has to do with circumvention, and it is used more frequently of the two statutes. Many people in open-source and free software communities hate this section, for good reason. We are NOT suing under section 1201. Then there's Section 1202, rarely used so far, which forbids providing false copyright management information or removing copyright management information. We believe that Katzer's removal of JMRI copyright notices, author's names, and license terms -- which qualify as copyright management information -- from our machine-readable XML decoder definitions is a violation of Sec. 1202. We believe this section is a great weapon we can use against Katzer to protect our intellectual property rights, so we charged Katzer and his company with a violation of this section. If we succeed, it will allow other open source groups to invoke this section to defend their intellectual property, and to obtain statutory damages and attorneys fees.