French Court Finds Violation Of GPL... Despite No Involvement Of Copyright Holder
from the interesting... dept
Guerby alerts us to the news that a French Appeals Court found that education tech company Edu4 violated the GPL by distributing a version of VNC without offering up the source code (and removing the GPL copyright notice). As the announcement notes, one interesting factor here was that it was filed by Edu4's customer, an education group, not the copyright holder. While it's nice to see a legal win for open source software, this does raise some questions. My guess is that the rationale is that this isn't a copyright case, but a licensing case. Thus the education group, AFPA, can actually be a party to the lawsuit. Still, it does raise questions over who has the right to make sure the GPL is enforced.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: copyright, france, gpl, license
Companies: afpa, edu4
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EULAs?
This is just odd.
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All what AFPA was asking is the right to cancel the market.
So while you may sue Apple, you are probably not in the same conditions as in this trial (AFPA had to follow public tender rules, they ordered for $250,000 and they were asking to cancel the order, not to get the VNC source code).
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Since you own every GPL source code too
Everyone owns every line of GPL source code.
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@inc
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Re: Since you own every GPL source code too
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Re:
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Yes this is not a pure copyright case since the copyright owner isn't involved at all.
About the question, it has been answered clearly: any person who is provided a GPL software binary can ask its provider to give him the corresponding source. Note that neither Edu4 nor the judge raised any doubt about that, and the only valid basis for the source code request is in the GPL, ie it's not in a separate contract between Edu4 and AFPA.
So at least in France this is now quite well settled.
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"Copyright" versus "License"
Guerby has it right: as a condition of the terms of the GPL, anyone provided with a binary (as AFPA was, by Edu4) has the right to demand the associated sources and the provider of the binary (Edu4 in this case) has the obligation (as a condition of _their_ having received the source code under the GPL terms) to provide it to them, for no more than the cost of putting the data onto media and shipping it...
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"Copyright" versus "License"
It is good to know :)
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And Another Thing!
Only the author, i.e. the person whose name is on the copyright line (legitimately) owns the code. If a company were, say, to take GPL code, use it in a product which they shipped to consumers, and fail to provide the source code, the author could go after the company for copyright infringement, and the case there is extremely clearcut: the organization has infringed on the author's copyright. (Harald Welte of gpl-violations.org, and the author of iptables, has gone after a number of companies, successfully...)
Consumers who received the device could (as AFPA did in France) go to court to force the vendor to adhere to the terms of the GPL, but they would not have the legal standing to make a copyright infringement claim...
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