[TriLUG] GPLv3 -- What do you think?

[Rick DeNatale]

On 3/16/06, Shane O'Donnell <shaneodonnell at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's also the issue of enforcement.  For argument's sake, say that
> the kernel does go to GPLv3 (or even stays at v2--doesn't matter for
> this argument).
>
> Since the GPL is enforceable under copyright law, the only people with
> grounds to bring an infringement claim are the holders of the
> copyrights--and the courts require ALL OF THEM.

Not that it's going to happen, but I suspect if the copyright holder of say
capability.c or kthread.c were to stand up and say "Wait a minute! You
guys are distributing my copyrighted work without my permission",
since those are two of the file which assert copyright without mention
of gpl or any other license, they might well have a case.

As an analogy, I doubt very much that the courts would fail to enforce
a copyright on a short story which was published without permission in
an anthology, just because the copyright holder of some other story in
the anthology didn't want to be party to the infringement suit.  In
fact, I'd suspect that if he did, the court would rule that he didn't
have standing because HE had licensed his work.

> Now the dead guys seem to factor in a little bit more...
>
> Note:  This is NOT how German courts handle it, as they require ANY
> ONE copyright holder (which in turn allowed Harald Welte to bring
> cases against Linksys, et al).

I think that these are different cases.  Wasn't the case against
Linksys that they were violating the GPL by not providing source code
to users?  This is different from a case where someone claims that
someone had published his copyrighted work as part of a compilation
without ever getting clear license.

The GPL needs two legs to stand up.  One is the statement by each
copyright holder that he is granting users license under the/a gpl. 
The other is the statement of copyright.  The first gives users the
right to use the work, and the second makes the gpl enforceable
against the user as a copyright violation.

I'm 99 44/100% sure that the intent of all of the linux kernel
contributors was to license their work under gpl, but that intent
doesn't seem to have been properly documented, and if push came to
shove...

--
Rick DeNatale

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