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Enforcing the GNU GPL - Copyright helps Copyleft
More and more vendors of various computing devices, especially network-related
appliances such as Routers, NAT-Gateways and 802.11 Access Points are using
Linux and other GPL licensed free software in their products.
While the Linux community can look at this as a big success, there is a back
side of that coin: A large number of those vendors have no idea about the GPL
license terms, and as a result do not fulfill their obligations under the GPL.
The netfilter/iptables project has started legal proceedngs against a number of
companies in violation of the GPL since December 2003. Those legal proceedings
were quite successful so far, resulting in twelve amicable agreements and one
granted preliminary injunction. The list of companies includes large
corporations such as Siemens, Asus and Belkin.
The speaker will present an overview about his recent successful enforcement of
the GNU GPL within German jurisdiction.
He will go on speaking about what exactly is neccessarry to fully comply with
the GPL, including his legal position on corner cases such as cryptographic
signing.
Resulting from his experience in dealing with the german legal system, he will
give some hints to software authors about what they can do in order to make
eventual later license enforcement easier.
In the end, it seems like the idea of the founding fathers of the GNU GPL
works: Guaranteeing Copyleft by using Copyright.
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