Re: Is the GPL all encompassing?

[amicus_curious]

"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message 
news:j8rCk.3869$pW5.424@fe085.usenetserver.com...
> amicus_curious wrote:
> > It is hard to understand just what you are getting at here.
>
> There are people who claim that distributing GPLed code without
> following the GPL's requirements is not copyright infringement.
> (Some allow that it might be a contract dispute, others that it
> is entirely permissible.) The fact that industry generally acts
> as if the GPL works as intended will be used as evidence to the
> contrary if one of those people actually winds up in court. This
> sort of evidence was presented in the JMRI appeal.

I see what you are saying now and I do agree that industry generally seems 
to avoid GPL issues due to their perceived viral nature.  I work for a very 
large software company and their specific policy is that no OSS code is 
allowed in our products unless specifically reviewed by our legal department 
and a technical staff that was set up for this specific purpose.  GPL is 
verboten to a very high degree.  With such a cumbersome process we pretty 
much do not even bother with trying to use OSS stuff.

I think that is contrary to the fundamental principles of OSS, though, and 
so conclude that the GPL does a lot of damage to the idea.

I don't know how that affects court cases in real life.  Certainly there are 
both contractual and copyright issues involved and the issue of how to 
compensate an author whose work is infringed is central to the litigation. 
To win a case, the author must prove that the work was infringed and harm 
occurred.  The JMRI issue seems to center around issuing an injunction and 
the only harm being asserted is the presumed harm that stems from some 
previous judgements in other cases.  I think that the author had no 
expectation of any monetary return, so that could not harm him.  I don't 
think that it is too far fetched for a court to decide that whatever harm 
there is to his ego due to non-attribution of his work is over balanced by 
what harm might come to the defendant if he were put out of business.  I am 
sure that the court could order some in-between solution if pressed to a 
verdict.

I cannot imagine that the work that was copied is so monumental that it 
could not be re-created in a non-infringing manner just as the OSS advocates 
insist that OSS code can be re-written to avoid any copyright or patent 
issues with commercial companies.