Enforcement of the GNU GPL in Germany and Europe

"GPL enforcement is successful in Europe. In several court decisions and out of court settlements the license conditions of the GPL have been successfully enforced. In particular, embedded systems are the main focus of such compliance activities. The article describes the practice of enforcement activities and the legal prerequisites under the application of German law.

"A. Rationale for enforcement of the GPL

"At present, the enforcement of the GPL license conditions is driven by single developers and organizations supporting Free Software. Most famous is Mr. Harald Welte, former maintainer of the Netfilter/Iptables project, who is running the enforcement project gpl-violations.org. Some years ago, Mr. Welte became aware of the fact that many manufacturers use the Linux kernel in their products without complying with the GPL conditions, and give the necessary credit to the Free Software community. His letters to the companies remained mostly unanswered or negotiations were so protracted that by the time the source code was eventually published, the relevant product was no longer available for sale. Therefore, he decided to take legal action in a more formal way.

"After the first enforcement cases became public, more and more interested parties informed Mr. Welte about other violations. He then decided to establish ‘www.gpl-violations.org’ to provide a platform for enforcement activities and public documentation of his and others’ efforts to bring commercial GPL users into GPL compliance.[1] Having access to modified source codes of technical devices is a strong motivation to participate in the enforcement of the GPL, and thus many people support gpl-violations.org."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• GNU/Linux and freedom: non-free software hidden in your GNU/Linux distribution(Apr 02, 2010)
• Kuhn: I Think I Just Got Patented(Feb 04, 2010)
• The Google Books Settlement Culture Clash, and What About Fair Use?(Feb 02, 2010)
• Understanding licenses, bit by bit (2)(Dec 18, 2009)
• Best Buy lawsuit shows how GPL violations have changed(Dec 17, 2009)
• Best Buy Caught in GPL Tussle(Dec 15, 2009)
• SFLC hammers GPL violators(Dec 14, 2009)
• The Anatomy of a Modern GPL Violation(Dec 09, 2009)
• GPL Enforcement: Don't Jump to Conclusions, But Do Report Violations(Nov 23, 2009)
• SFLC tech director finds one new GPL violator every day(Nov 10, 2009)