GPL Case Against Danish Satellite Provider

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Sun Aug 16 14:56:52 UTC 2009


| From: Dave Cramer <davec-zxk95TxsVYDyHADnj0MGvQC/G2K4zDHf at public.gmane.org>

| More interesting is that according to the GPL the original authors have to
| make the complaint. So each individual project has to make a legal
| complaint.

No, any individual copyright holder (author) can make a complaint.

The real headache is that any settlement must be agreed to by every
copyright holder for the other side to feel confident.  In particular,
once you are out of compliance with the GPL, you cannot get onside
again without all copyright holders agreeing (i.e. the GPL itself
gives no way of regaining the rights you lost by going out of
compliance so you need to relicense it).

Although this is a real problem, I don't know if it has shown up in
practice.

As an example that I was peripherally involved in, Hava distributed
Busybox and the kernel and probably other GPLed code without
compliance.  They were sued by (some of) the busybox copyright
holders.  They settled by agreeing to abide by the terms of the GPL
and by giving undisclosed amounts of money to the Software Freedom Law
Center (and perhaps to the litigating copyright holders).  They were
not sued with respect to the Kernel.  In theory, I think that they
could still be.

By looking at thw Wiki page
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits you can see that 
authorship of Busybox is contentious.  I recently toned down the last 
sentence of that section.  Here's what it had said:
-  	
    It should be noted that no other prior developers including original
    author Bruce Perens and long time maintainer Dave Cinege were
    represented in these actions raising questions as to Anderson and
    Landley's copyright claims and standing to bring suit.{{Fact|date=June
    2009}} 
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