The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 2, 2017 22:41 UTC (Tue) by armijn (subscriber, #3653)
In reply to: The rise of copyright trolls by Cyberax
Parent article: The rise of copyright trolls

As said, I really wish it were as simple as this. I am often looking at complex supply chains, spanning several continents and several decades, trying to get licensing issues fixed that were introduced by people in companies that were bought by companies that no longer exist. Add to that cultural barriers, language issues, very quickly rotating staff, no leverage against suppliers (always check your contracts, folks!) in a supercompetitive "winner takes all" market and multiple jurisdictions with possibly conflicting requirements.

Although it might seem easy it turns out that it is extremely difficult to fix. I am trying though.

The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 3, 2017 9:38 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

So people neglected their due dilligance and now pay the price. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. The GPL does not ask for any outrageous compensation. It asks for a very simple thing. If companies cannot be arsed to comply even with that, it's their own fault. They wouldn't dare to ignore Microsoft's copyright and license terms as blatently but somehow if it's just the GPL, it is OK.

It's actually much harder to comply with Microsoft's licenses. "Oh, we were not allowed to move that machine into a VM because somewhere in the 50 pages of EULA that's forbidden?" Microsoft is also much harder on its users with mandatory license checks which can turn out to be much work for a company. Yet it does not harm their business in the slightest. So it's hard to imagine a mass exodus off Linux just because companies need to tighten up their supply chains.

The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 4, 2017 12:03 UTC (Thu) by mikemol (guest, #83507) [Link]

> So people neglected their due dilligance and now pay the price. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.

Do you know what the alternative is? Whatever's quick, easy and is *pre-approved by Legal* so a dev team can get their quick-turnaround, low-margin, product out the door in time to be on the shelves this Christmas.

Which is going to mean more-permissive licenses at best, quick-hack one-off in-house software or licensed proprietary libraries and systems at worst.

That's not an improvement. Nobody expects you to feel sorry for them, but you might have some sympathy for the Internet whose quality of network peer will very likely suffer.