[ale] OSS Copyrights upheld

[Charles Shapiro]

Actually, it's slightly more subtle than that. You can always sue anyone in
this great United States of America. After this decision though, if the bad
guys appropriate your OSS and don't live up to the license, they're
automatically copyright violators.

The alternative theory was that the license was some kind of 'contract', and
so in order to win your case you'd have to not only prove the violation, but
also convince the court of a bunch of other unrelated stuff about the GPL
and your rights over your creation. And then ( IF you won), the court would
get to set the amount of  money you got pretty much by whim. This
development makes it a whole lot more likely that you can sue and win, and
that once you've won you'll actually recover some reasonable sum.

Groklaw has much more detailed coverage (
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008081313212422 ).

-- CHS


On 8/15/08, Jeff Lightner <jlightner at water.com> wrote:
>
>  *
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080815/ap_on_hi_te/tec_free_software_lawsuit;_ylt=AoNx14B697XQlfeJF73IC6BI2ocA
> *<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080815/ap_on_hi_te/tec_free_software_lawsuit;_ylt=AoNx14B697XQlfeJF73IC6BI2ocA>
>
> Basically says if a commercial company appropriates OSS but doesn't make
> what they offer OSS they can be sued.
>  ----------------------------------
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