Copyright notices (or the lack thereof) in kernel code

Posted Oct 27, 2022 17:45 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Copyright notices (or the lack thereof) in kernel code by Wol
Parent article: Copyright notices (or the lack thereof) in kernel code

Criminal vs. civil, for copyright, is dependent on context.

I understand that in some jurisdictions, copyright infringement is uniformly a matter of criminal law, while in others, whether copyright infringement constitutes a crime or a tort depends on things like "scale" and "commerciality". (And I dare say there's a jurisdiction somewhere out there where copyright infringement is purely a civil matter.)

Copyright notices (or the lack thereof) in kernel code

Posted Oct 27, 2022 23:30 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> (And I dare say there's a jurisdiction somewhere out there where copyright infringement is purely a civil matter.)

The US comes surprisingly close. Commercial copyright infringement is technically a criminal matter, but in practice the federal government has better things to do, so you would usually only get prosecuted if you make a nuisance of yourself and the (rather substantial) civil remedies are inadequate. See for example Kim Dotcom. But the vast majority of copyright infringement is either handled civilly or informally (i.e. without directly involving the court system, usually in the form of DMCA notices, as well as stuff like ContentID).