Kuhn: It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights

I don't think the statistics, when so heavily anonymized, would really give a clear picture. I can't speak for other orgs that purport to do enforcement, but with Conservancy (who currently does GPL enforcement for BusyBox, Debian, Inkscape, Linux, and Samba), we decided to just annually report how much of our resources (staff time, legal fees) are spent on license compliance and enforcement. However, given that the grant is relatively recent, I want to point out that the big news for Conservancy's enforcement is we now have a large grant to work on GPL enforcement which has allowed us to increase our work on enforcement substantially: https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement...

I also generally think giving a sense of how much time is spent by the org and explaining the strategy is more important and useful than raw numbers of violation reports and open matters and closed matters. The most important reason for that is that often, a single large successful enforcement action against a powerful company, or a lawsuit, quickly changes behavior of many other companies in a period of just a few months. To use an example that's old enough that it's easy to talk about the details: So, if you look back to the history of enforcement (let's consider the BusyBox enforcement in the late 2000s that Conservancy did), I suspect you'd see a huge spike in violation reports over a period of 2004-2008, yielding 100s of active reports, but Conservancy was at the time working on only about 15-20 of those matters. Then we filed the lawsuit, and then we saw lots of really good compliance come about, even among companies that weren't sued (because they realized the stakes were real and didn't want to be sued next). So, if you read a stats snapshot that right before Conservancy's lawsuit in early 2009, you'd see hundreds of pending violation reports and Conservancy working only 17 of them. You'd probably have said seeing those numbers at that time that we were doing a bad job! But, we were carefully curating a list of defendants that were the right mix to file the suit, which we then leveraged to assure others who weren't sued came into compliance.

It's no secret that GPL enforcement is grossly underfunded, and that means leverage must be used to assure compliance. If we had 10x the resources for enforcement, absolutely there are other great strategies that would be possible.