Richard Fontana wrote: > the dominant assumption has been that the GPL is enforceable only by > copyright holders. At one time I think this was even thought to have a > policy justification, though I think that may have been rooted in > confusion.
I don't think there's a policy justification either. But I also don't know of a way of an end-user to have a cause of action to enforce GPL that's likely to work other than the fraud stuff in Australia that I mentioned before. The AFPA enforcement by FSF France is worth mentioning as well: http://fsffrance.org/news/article2009-09-22.en.html that was novel because, IIUC, AFPA was able to show that Edu4 violated their separate agreement by failing to comply with GPL, by one of those "you agree to abide by all relevant legal terms" catch-all boilerplate clauses, and the court held the GPL was included by reference (even though AFPA didn't know the GPL was involved). (I don't read French so I may have the details wrong there; I'm summarizing based on a summary that Loic gave me years ago :) This is really really useful, but sadly is not necessarily useful on consumer devices since consumers rarely get to negotiate such wording into contracts before buying. However, maybe there is some consumer law or something else like that which would work. If someone can find one and we can start filing class action suits, great! I'm open minded about these strategies but no one has ever come to me with a proposal that seems like it has a chance, at least in the USA. > In the typical case of a GPL violation -- Bradley, if he reads this, can > correct me if I am mistaken -- you have, in principle, infringement of > thousands of copyrights. Depends on how you count a "single copyright". I don't know what it means to say "infringement of thousands of copyrights", unless you mean "a thousand copyright registrations", but I know you don't mean that. > What I'm getting at is that the employer, even *if* it is a copyright > holder, is not necessarily best situated to pursue the violation if it > advances beyond the initial stage. Depends on the employer and who the > alleged violator is, really. The best thing to bring is a coalition of copyright holders, which is why Conservancy builds those coalitions for the Linux, BusyBox and Samba projects. -- bkuhn
