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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Depends on the terms of the license | 197 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Copyright violation, not GPL violation
Authored by: tiger99 on Friday, September 14 2012 @ 05:38 PM EDT
Yes, it starts as a GPL violation, but in failing to comply with the terms of the GPL, it ceases to provide them with a licence to use the code, which is covered by normal copyright. So, they break copyright law, which is relatively simple and easy to enforce.

In the UK, that is actually a criminal offence if done in the course of operating a business, i.e. for profit, and the offence can be prosecuted by the authorities, possibly resulting in jail sentences.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Depends on the terms of the license
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 14 2012 @ 05:51 PM EDT

IANAL - but the following makes sense to me.

If all licenses were built equally and had a clause that said:

    If you breach this license, the license is automatically revoked!
Then... maybe yes it would become a copyright violation, maybe no.

Did you - as the breacher of the license - immediately stop any activities granted by the license which would otherwise not be allowed by Copyright Law? If you did - in other words, when you were at a point of not being licensed to copy and distribute, you did not copy and distribute - then I'd say you're only in breach of the license and not copyright law.

If you continued such activities - then you were in both breach of the license as well as breach of copyright law.

Change the license so it doesn't have that automatic revoke and instead carries other forms of compensation for the breach - Copyright Law is not in breach.

See what I mean? Answer: It Depends!

Isn't any license violation really a copyright violation?
Such a statement really doesn't account for exceptions (if they're not the norm) and as a result it becomes a global statement. And global statements are rarely every true.
    Everyone j-walks!
    No... I don't j-walk. As I'm a member of that unit refered to as "everyone", the statement is automatically false!

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • One Time Breach - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 17 2012 @ 05:19 AM EDT
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