Recent Source Code IP Legal Cases
Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse named in SFLC Suit today
Click for more information
Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse and JVC are all among 14 consumer electronic companies named in a copyright infringement lawsuit, filed by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). Each company is being charged for selling products containing BusyBox in violation of the terms of its license, the GPLv2.
From 2007 until now, this kind of violation has been a growing issue among many consumer electronic companies. The SFLC has sued 6 companies since 2007 for being in violation of the GPL, which makes it more critical than ever for manufacturers to learn to comply with the GPL. It is also fundamentally imperative for companies to realize the importance of compliance as they begin to obtain the advantages of the zero-cost licensing of free and open source software over alternatives.
Microsoft Apologizes for Juku Code Lifting, but Questions Remain
Click for more information
Recently, Microsoft issued an apology to Plurk (IT start-up) when it was discovered that some 80 percent of it’s product code found its way into Microsoft’s newly developed micro blogging application. Microsoft believes the mishap is a fault of a third-party vender who resumed the responsibility of developing the application.
eWEEK Darryl Taft comment on the case:
"I know that when the code in question is clearly open source code they tend to use tools like Black Duck…” “But for plain old code, I am not aware of any uniform standard they might use other than something like Black Duck. Because Black Duck has a component called Protex that helps resolve IP issues by identifying potential license conflicts, it's supposed to work for third party software as well as open source stuff."
Communitcations from the Open Source community at Microsoft
Click for more information
Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool was found to contain the GPLv2 code. Microsoft’s position is that the code in question was not intentionally misused, but they are sharing the responsibility for the error with the third party contracted to create the tool. Microsoft will not likely get much credit for how they handled this issue from the ideologues out there, but we think that they did a good job, acknowledged the mistake, removed the objectionable code, and made the source code as well as binaries for the tool available under the terms of the GPLv2. Microsoft strives to always respect the terms under which code is being shared and plans to use this experience as a guide for future code reviews that they perform.
Big Win for GNU GPL in France
Click for more information
This recent court case in France there was a major decision supporting the enforceability of the GPL although it came from a user of the software not from the copyright holders of the code.
The Paris Court of Appeals decided that the company Edu4 violated the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) when it distributed binary copies of the remote desktop access software VNC but denied users access to its corresponding source code. This decision was a landmark ruling and one that will set legal precedent in France.
This is a significant and unique ruling due to the fact that the suit was filed by a user of the software, instead of a copyright holder. Typically its the copyright holder of a work that looks to enforce the license's terms.
