SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 16, 2022 18:18 UTC (Mon) by developer122 (guest, #152928)
In reply to: SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts by developer122
Parent article: SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

found the link: https://blog.opensource.org/modified-agplv3-removes-freed...

Basically, the decision seems to be that if you're not licencing from someone else you're free to set whatever initial terms you like, and this includes adding additional terms that supersede parts of the licence. Downstream licencees can't do the same because they have to follow the GPL+other stuff combination, and the GPL says no (unless your extra stuff says yes?).

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 16, 2022 18:19 UTC (Mon) by developer122 (guest, #152928) [Link] (5 responses)

In a practical sense, it just means stay away from people pushing combinations of the GPL + other stuff.

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 16, 2022 20:37 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

> In a practical sense, it just means stay away from people pushing combinations of the GPL + other stuff.

If they can't comply with any two licenses individually and together, they should be staying away from publishing any software that uses such license combinations. If the practical sense is that there is less licensing violations, that's a good outcome.

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 16, 2022 23:35 UTC (Mon) by developer122 (guest, #152928) [Link] (3 responses)

The initial publisher does not have to comply with the GPL, even if they make use of it. They are free to set any terms they wish. That is the key finding of this case.

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 17, 2022 1:23 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

> They are free to set any terms they wish. That is the key finding of this case.

Disagree. There is no new news here.

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 17, 2022 10:52 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Just to be clear, you're just disagreeing with "That is the key finding of this case." right? Or are you also disagreeing with "They are free to set any terms they wish."? Because if you disagree with the term-setting part, what impact does that have on authors being able to choose their terms in the first place?

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 17, 2022 15:14 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> Just to be clear, you're just disagreeing with "That is the key finding of this case." right?

Correct. It has been well established that copyright licenses apply to other people and not the authors. Authors can do whatever they want to their own code and how they license their code is only limited by what copyright itself allows for and what they call their license may also be restricted by trademarks. There is no key new finding in this case from that perspective. The weight of the case only remains in the third party enforcement of the licensing terms.

Disclaimer: Not a lawyer, YMMV etc.

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 16, 2022 20:06 UTC (Mon) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (2 responses)

An originator of the code can put on whatever licence they like and distribute their code accordingly - even if licence terms are incompatible. We've known that since the late Joerg Schilling and cdrecord - nothing new here, I think.

As for the GPL being a contract : again, nothing too unusual here in my opinion.

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 16, 2022 20:23 UTC (Mon) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link]

This subthread appears to be more about the Neo4j issue than the original article. For completeness, here is the SFC blog post that I wrote on the Neo4j issue. It addresses some of the questions and comments raised in this subthread regarding, for example, AGPLv3§7¶4.

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 16, 2022 20:38 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

> As for the GPL being a contract : again, nothing too unusual here in my opinion.

Note that there is a crucial difference: in this case (and two others) the contract argued is between the seller and the buyer, and does not involve the copyright holder.
This argument is that when you buy a software, the seller must make sure it is properly licensed.
In particular, the buyer has standing to sue, which would not be the case for a copyright case.

But that does not mean the GNU GPL is a contract between the copyright holder and the seller as asserted
by L. Rosen (interalia).

(to give an analogy: if you buy a windows laptop and you find out it run a bootleg version of windows instead of a properly licensed one you asked, you can sue the seller for contract breach even if MS will not bother. The ruling was that the above apply even if you replace 'windows license' by 'GNU GPL'.)

SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Posted May 17, 2022 17:00 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

IANAL, but my reading is that the case doesn't set much of a precedent. It was well understood that the original author has the right to set whatever license they choose. What made this case vaguely interesting was that the license was poorly written so the meaning was unclear. The original author made their license by adding terms to a license that included a clause saying you could remove additional terms from the license. This was legitimately ambiguous, and the judge's job in the case was to resolve the ambiguity. The judge wound up deciding the "additional restrictions" clause would apply to the license as received from the original software author, not the license as written by the original license writer.

It seems to me that the big take-home lesson from this is that it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble if the original author had paid to have a competent lawyer write a new license that was less ambiguous. In the long run, it would have been cheaper to pay a lawyer for a few days work writing a new license than to pay them to defend an ambiguous license in court. And that's on top of the time and money the other side paid to push their theory, the time the judge spent ruling on the case, and so forth.