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This will end when authors of a GPL licensed project with few authors (to make it easy to get everyone on board) decide they'd like some money now please, get a
by c2h5oh 4y ago
This will end when authors of a GPL licensed project with few authors (to make it easy to get everyone on board) decide they'd like some money now please, get a decent law firm to take the case on contingency and hit some company hard.
Praat would actually be a good candidate with just 2 people contributing majority of the code.
Record labels argued in court that each song shared in p2p networks that was downloaded at least once entitled them to statutory 150k USD in damages. Using that same logic Praat authors could demand 150k per release of voice.ai software at the very least.
In fact I would really like them to do that - it would fund further development of Praat at least and set a precedent showing that GPL != public domain, which seems to be the perception of many companies including large corporations, simply because nobody will care to enforce it.
- leni536 4y agoSure, try to infringe on some dual license software where one kf the licenses is GPL, these have few authors for obvious reasons. I bet the authors of Qt would sue, with an easy case for damages.
- pabs3 4y agoConservancy recommends that "Community-oriented enforcement must never prioritize financial gain" because "it can in some cases work against the purpose of copyleft". They do suggest it is reasonable to ask for costs for bringing the company into compliance (lawyers fees, staff time etc) though. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
- pabs3 4y agoSoftware Freedom Conservancy does enforce copyleft licenses, including suing violators. Their current lawsuit against Vizio is interesting because they aren't suing as copyright holders, but as recipients of GPL binaries from Vizio, they say that they are a third-party beneficiary of the GPL and thus they ask the court to force Vizio to release the relevant source code. Thus they create the possibility for any user of GPL binaries to sue for source code release. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html