What the judge's rulings do is loosen the standards in terms of going after monetary damages. Normally, a fair amount of the sting of copyright infringement li

What the judge's rulings do is loosen the standards in terms of going after monetary damages. Normally, a fair amount of the sting of copyright infringement like this would be the monetary damages you can get hit with. What this case established is that violating free-as-in-beer (and also free-as-in-speech) software's copyright can result in these monetary damages even though the software's free. So while this case doesn't specifically say "The GPL is valid", it does say that violating a copyleft license can put you on the hook for serious monetary penalties. This is crucial, because those give GPL compliance enforcers another major weapon in their arsenal (in addition to injuctions) to bring companies into line.