On reimbursement of costs for enforcement actions & related issues

Posted Dec 6, 2015 6:45 UTC (Sun) by ncm (guest, #165)
In reply to: On reimbursement of costs for enforcement actions & related issues by bkuhn
Parent article: A referendum on GPL enforcement

The evidence is by now super-abundant that SFC's "enforcement principles", as formulated, are a failure. This is not to say no morally defensible principles are possible. Rather, out of the universe of possible morally defensible principles, this choice has been amply demonstrated to be poor enough to merit reformulating. There is no shame in admitting the truth. It is not as if the results of all the failed attempts were predictable. They had to be tried, but having been tried, now we know, and can act on what we now know.

The solution may be to start another organization, e.g. The Coding Liberty Cooperative, with more effective principles, sign up authors, and go into competition, maybe pursuing repeat offenders who have been let off too easily by SFC.

On reimbursement of costs for enforcement actions & related issues

Posted Dec 8, 2015 2:58 UTC (Tue) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (3 responses)

Yeah. If SFC is casually tossing around the term "savvy violators", it's clear that whatever they're doing is ineffective. Maybe "our primary goal in GPL enforcement is to bring about GPL compliance" should be replaced with "our primary goal in GPL enforcement is to seek large monetary damages as a punitive measure to make violators think twice about doing it again in the future." I'd donate money to get that kind of thing going.

On reimbursement of costs for enforcement actions & related issues

Posted Dec 8, 2015 21:22 UTC (Tue) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] (2 responses)

There are practical reasons to follow our principles, not just moral ones. I think people here are a bit confused what types of damages are even possible in copyright infringement cases. The damages are decided by a judge and/or a jury, and are unpredictable, and you don't find out what they are until you're at the end of the case. And, if you lose the case, you often have to pay the other side's attorney's fees in many jurisdictions.

Even if avarice was maximized in these enforcement cases, the proceeds wouldn't be seen for a very long time.

Anyway, the only logistical way to get large amounts of money quickly and easily is to take pay-offs to look the other way when compliance isn't achieved. There are people making money doing that, which Jon made reference to in the original article. I denounce that as immoral, even if it would be a way to get money easily.

You can see on Conservancy's Form 990s that we did receive money in the BusyBox enforcement, which funded more enforcement. But enforcement where compliance is the paramount goal is only partially self-funding. I hope people will donate to bridge the gap.

On reimbursement of costs for enforcement actions & related issues

Posted Dec 10, 2015 10:46 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

US statutory damages are $750 per work, minimum. On a judgment of infringement, the court has to grant at least that, and may grant more. If the violator distributed 100,000 products, that's $75 million.

Oh, but, if the violator proves (burden on the violator) that they really didn't know, and shouldn't have known, the court can reduce damages to $200 per work. So then you only get $20 million.

That's still $20 million, in the absolute worst case, for what I would imagine to be a fairly low-volume product. What am I missing here?

On reimbursement of costs for enforcement actions & related issues

Posted Jul 20, 2016 21:14 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

The moral and practical imperative must be to ensure that GPL compliance is more attractive than not, by taking stern action against at least some violators. The best way to make sure action can be taken is for that action to be self-sustaining - paying for the action taken at least, ideally also punitive costs that can then be used to pre-pay for the next action. Anything less would surely be doing a _disservice_ to the viability of the GPL?

The one cautionary bit is that such actions mustn't put off more people from going with GPL software than are attracted to it.