[Ilugc] Immunity from IPR issues for Closed Source software
- From: linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Suresh Ramasubramanian)
- Date: Thu Jul 22 11:35:54 2004
Ramanraj K wrote:
If a proprietary company has lifted code from a GPL'ed program, and
redistributes binaries in violation of the GPL, the author of the
GPL'ed program could claim copyright infringement, and the source code
could be summoned in appropriate proceedings. At present, disclosure of
source code for computer programs is not mandatory, and when that is
done, the problem would cease.
This happened in 2001 I think in India -
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/02/1540205
An outfit called DSF Internet (based in New Delhi) ripped off the
everybuddy source code and ported it to windows, calling it
"MessengerA2Z". Just that
* They didnt acknowledge everybuddy anywhere in their release
* They did an imperfect job of running sed to convert everybuddy to
messengera2z
* They marketed this IM client messengera2z to several ISPs.
Everybuddy sued them, and a lot of the ISPs that had paid fat fees to
license messengera2z dropped it.
srs
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