Kuhn: It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights

Posted Jul 4, 2021 13:25 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Kuhn: It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights by pabs
Parent article: Kuhn: It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights

> but FSF/Conservancy rely on donations in order to do enforcement actions,

Seriously? Why? Have they actually tried to squeeze money from the copyright violators? Patrick McHardy was quite efficient at doing that — and he only owns a bit of Linux, not that much. FSF owns copyright for everything in some products.

Note that, technically speaking, to become “fully compliant” violators have to find and present sources for all versions of all FSF-owned GPL software they have ever shipped.

For most of them it's just not possible: they couldn't provide sources because they don't have them and companies which provided binaries no longer exist. For most of them it's still a huge hassle, even if it's technically possible.

Paying certain sum for every known violation would just be easier and cheaper for them.

And if the number of violations is measured in thousands (which is probably true) then this activity should be able to pay for itself.

> The music industry has another revenue stream that they can tap into for funding their enforcement actions.

Technically yes, but many companies which assault torrent users in Germany and elsewhere actually pay for that privilege. With penalties for a single willful copyright violation measured in thousands of dollars that's not very hard.

> AFAICT you are complaining that isn't done.

Kinda. With all copyrights passed to FSF copyright enforcement should be easier (that's what article which we are discussing here claims and that's true), but, in turn, FSF becomes the only entity which may do that. If it's still not done, then… why spend so much effort doing the hassle of copyright assignments and everything else?