Hyman Rosen wrote: > Relatively few companies are interested in becoming martyrs to try to > destroy the GPL. The JMRI case is about the closest that I can think of > in that respect.
There is also the case against D-Link in Germany. D-Link agreed to come into compliance with the GPL, but refused to reimburse gpl-violations.org for its expenses. German law would apparently allow such a claim for expenses, assuming that D-Link had really infringed copyright. The courts ruled in favour of gpl-violations.org, and ordered D-Link to pay the expenses. In order to reach this decision, they had to find the GPL to be valid, since otherwise there would be no copyright infringement and so expenses couldn't be claimed. On the other hand, D-Link had already agreed to stop distributing the infringing devices, so there was no need to grant an injunction (and they didn't). http://gpl-violations.org/news/20060922-dlink-judgement_frankfurt.html Although the GPL was a "creative" use of copyright licensing, in the sense that nothing quite like it had been attempted before, I don't see why there should be questions about its validity. The law gives people freedom to choose their own licence terms (subject to some specific restrictions, but none of them seem to apply here). If I hand you a program with no explicit licence, then you cannot pass copies to other people. If I hand you a program together with the GPL, it follows that you can only pass copies to other people because the GPL is valid. If the GPL was invalid, presumably you would have no right to distribute copies at all. There is no point arguing that the GPL is invalid because, even if the court accepted your argument, you would still not be allowed to distribute your product. It doesn't really matter whether the GPL is a licence or a unilateral contract -- or whether they are actually the same thing. You are still caught: you can't claim the right to distribute copies under the GPL without also accepting the obligations. In America, do you have the account of profits remedy for infringement? In Britain, if A infringes B's copyright, B can claim damages for the loss caused to him by the infringement. Alternatively, he can claim the profits which A made by his infringement. It might be hard for an open source project to quantify the loss it suffered in monetary terms, but I wonder if it would be possible for it to claim the profits. That could be a substantial amount of money for a widely distributed product, and it would still be possible to ask for an injunction as well. Pete _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
