Big GPL copyright enforcement win in Paris Court of Appeals

[nsane.forums]

The Free Software Foundation France (FSF France) is jubilant about a recent court ruling that has affirmed the validity of the open source GNU General Public License (GPL) under French copyright law. This successful GPL enforcement effort will send a strong message about the importance of open source license compliance to the French software industry.

The GPL is a copyleft license that mandates reciprocal disclosure of source code. When a company incorporates code that is licensed under the GPL into their software product, they are obligated to make their own code available under the terms of the GPL, which stipulates that source code must be made available for third parties to study, modify, and redistribute. Companies that ship GPL-based products must provide notice to end users and promise to furnish source code upon request.

Companies that use the GPL but fail to comply with the license's terms are exposing themselves to the risk of copyright infringement litigation. GPL noncompliance is almost always the result of ignorance or honest misunderstanding. In such cases, organizations like the FSF and the Software Freedom Law Center will engage with perpetrators and attempt to educate them about their legal responsibilities so that a nonconfrontational solution can be reached outside of court.

In a handful of rare cases, however, companies have stubbornly attempted to defy licensing obligations and end up being taken to court by developers who are represented by open source advocacy legal groups. This almost never ends well for the companies in question and they typically end up settling out of court when they realize that they can't win. It's very rare for a GPL enforcement case to proceed all the way to an actual ruling. One example from Europe is a 2007 case in which VoIP company Skype was slapped with an injunction for failing to make source code available for a Linux-based VoIP handset.

The recent case in France involved a dispute over the licensing of remote desktop access software. A company called Edu4, which sells distance learning tools and multimedia equipment for education, was distributing a derivative of an open source VNC software client, but declined to provide its source code despite its obligation to do so under the GPL. The company had also stripped out copyright notices and other markers that would have identified the program to users as open source software.

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