GPL prevails again
Skype withdraws appeal
THE GPL WON OUT again Thursday in a German courtroom as Skype withdrew its appeal of a lower court ruling saying it violated the General Public License by offering mobile phones that used a modified Linux kernel without publishing that source code.
Harald Welte of the gpl-violations.org project sued Skype to enforce the GPL in February 2007. He won an injunction against Skype in a Munich court, but Skype appealed to a higher court. The hearing on Skype's appeal was held yesterday.
Skype's lawyers apparently tried to attack the GPL, attempting to argue that it violates German anti-trust law and other legislation and is somehow invalid. But the judges were having none of it.
The court held that Skype had not presented sufficient evidence or case law to support making such arguments. And even if it had, the court pointed out, then Skype would not be able to claim rights under the GPL.
The court might also have added that, were the GPL ruled invalid, Skype would have no license whatsoever and it would be committing copyright infringement.
After the court twice hinted that, if it was forced to judge, Skype was not likely to win, Skype wisely chose to withdraw its appeal and accept the lower court's decision. µ
See Also
Skype
loses GPL V2 case
L'Inq
Groklaw
Comments
Good
I just wanted to say that I think things like GPLs , Open sauce software in general, open source knowledge (Think Wikipedia), etc are some of the best things that man as a whole have done lately! It's the "right thing" to do imo, and its rare that people do that!Case law is the monkey on my back
God, I hate those two words, ¨case law.¨ I´ve done a bit of research here in the US, not exhaustive, but a good amount, and I don´t think case law is legal, despite how often it is cited. I think if this whole idea of citing case law were declared invalid by the Supreme Court, and decisions only applied to their own cases, this country(the United States) would be tremendously better off.Case Law
Is also known as common law. The US court system is based on the English system.If it were eliminated, common law would have to be replaced by statutory law, and our state/national congresses can't get their work done as it is, we don't need them worrying about amending or clarifying laws to apply to every individual court case.