Enforcing the GPL

Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on May 12, 2006

Joe Brockmeier has written a piece for newsforge on Enforcing the GPL (GNU Public License), and while the news is not good, there is substantial hope, including the information (which I'd overlooked) that because copyright has fixed term, there is no statue of limitations, so even if enforcement is very lax, we can catch up later. There had to be at least one silver lining to the continuous attempts to increase the length of copyright terms.

Most of the infringing appears to be in the embedded market, particularly in the routers and other "Internet" devices:

According to former BusyBox maintainer Erik Andersen, violations are fairly common. "I get roughly three reports every week of some device or other that is shipping with BusyBox in violation of the license; i.e., the vendor fails to support source, fails to offer source, and in many cases, claims the software is completely proprietary, when in fact it is obviously running Linux and using BusyBox."

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		Enforcing the GPL Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on May 12, 2006 Joe Brockmeier has written a piece for newsforge on Enforcing the GPL (GNU Public License), and while the news is not good, there is substantial hope, including the information (which I'd overlooked) that because copyright has fixed term, there is no statue of limitations, so even if enforcement is very lax, we can catch up later. There had to be at least one silver lining to the continuous attempts to increase the length of copyright terms. Most of the infringing appears to be in the embedded market, particularly in the routers and other "Internet" devices: According to former BusyBox maintainer Erik Andersen, violations are fairly common. "I get roughly three reports every week of some device or other that is shipping with BusyBox in violation of the license; i.e., the vendor fails to support source, fails to offer source, and in many cases, claims the software is completely proprietary, when in fact it is obviously running Linux and using BusyBox." Copyright \| Copyright Infringement \| GNU Public License (GPL) \| GPL \| Intellectual Property \| intellectual property law \| intellectual property rights \| Open Source \| Open Source Software \| US Copyright Office \| WIPO Copyright Treaty Stuart's blog Login or register to post comments 3869 reads
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