Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:
There is nothing to "get". If the court finds that it cannot act
because defendants have infringed upon a non-registered version,
the plaintiffs can simply register that version and refile the
claim. We know this from the SimplexGrinnell court decision.
I should think that it is sufficient if enough protected material
from the registered version can be found in the distribution, whether
or not there is an exact version match.
Otherwise one could simply modify a few lines, and lo-and-behold, the
resulting version is no longer registered. That's silly.
Determining the exact original version (rather than sufficient
amounts of protected material) would only be interesting if different
versions have been licensed under different conditions and/or to
different people.
For example, if I licensed version 1.8 to somebody and find that he
is distributing code derived from an older version 1.6 containing
portions of code that has since then be removed (for whatever
reason).
In such cases, determining the exact version makes a difference.
But in the case where registered and contentious version have been
made available to the same people under the same conditions, exact
version matching appears pointless. Sufficient amounts of matching
code should do the trick.