9 ms·
> Entr’Ouvert sued Orange in 2010 How such a simple thing could take 14 years to untangle? How could anyone trust in courts that have such a spectacular effic
by Arech 3y ago
> Entr’Ouvert sued Orange in 2010
How such a simple thing could take 14 years to untangle?
How could anyone trust in courts that have such a spectacular efficiency?
- sebstefan 3y agoOur supreme court got involved, I don't think that's a fast process in any country.
- lucianbr 3y agoWhat you say is true, and relevant to the discussion, but... it doesn't answer anything. A very long and dragged out process takes away the justness of it all, and the fact that the supreme court was involved does not change that in any way. If you're a victim, the courts are supposed to provide a remedy. Even the supreme court. That's at least part of their reason for existing. If you have to wait 14 years for a remedy, they're not doing their job right, no matter how supreme they are. The fact that it goes the same in other countries also doesn't help. The system is broken everywhere, that's all.
- Seb-C 3y agoJustice in France has been broken and supremely inefficient for a very long time unfortunately.
- enqk 3y agoI find that a lot of support services for individuals are like that in France, technically there but made ineffective because they are very slow.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoSadly, "justice" isn't the job of the supreme court, it's to interpret the constituion. If it takes 10 months or 10 years, that's not an issue in the grand scheme of things. For the US, the right to a speedy trial is for criminal cases, not civil. And I don't think breaking software licenses is a criminal act unless a mass of damages were done. That's basically the logic that LLM's are working off of right now; get into dubious lawsuits and become top of the food chain by the time the litigation settles. Heck, quite a few pieces of tech work that way. Lootboxes came and went in western video games before it even had time to be challenged.
- sebstefan 3y agoJust so you know, the role of the supreme court may not be 1:1 between what you're used to in the US and the rest of the world In France the supreme court's role isn't tied to the constitution, just the law. They're to dictate which ways the law is to be interpreted and homogenize the decisions by the different lower courts. We have a different (actually, two...) administrative organs that ensure that the law follows the constitution
- addcommitpush 3y agoConseil constitutionnel + ?
- paduc 3y agoConseil d’état ?
- addcommitpush 3y agoI don't think so, are you sure? The Conseil d'Etat has two distinct roles (and thus two distinct branches): - serving as the supreme court for the administrative "order" - as a judge, the CE does not check if laws are constitutionnal - serving as legal counsel to the government - in which case it does check if bills put forward by the governement (i.e. not laws already adopted) are constitutionnal but this is merely advisory.
- sebstefan 3y agoI thought "conseil constitutionnel" on the judicial branch + "conseil d'état" on the administrative branch (french law is split in two branches), but apparently the "conseil constitutionnel" is doing both, the split is "cour de cassation" (supreme court) + "conseil d'état" (administrative supreme court), with the conseil constitutionnel doing its thing upstream unrelated to any of them.
- School-Cotton 3y ago> They're to dictate which ways the law is to be interpreted and homogenize the decisions by the different lower courts. FWIW, the U.S. Supreme Court also has this role. People focus more on their constitutional cases because those are the most impactful/famous, but a lot of their workload is just interpreting normal laws, especially ones that have diverged among the various lower courts.
- yard2010 3y agoIt's the same in all the western countries, that's the point. It's better than nothing but not enough at all
- danbmil99 3y agoI was involved in a high profile business case that took over 6 years and went up to the Supreme Court. Another case I was involved in years ago took 7 years to resolve. I've heard stories that India was the worst with some cases passing down through generations over 50 60 70 years.
- aetherspawn 3y agoIt doesn’t end here. I won money this way and getting them to actually pay is near impossible unless you want to burn like $50k on lawyers putting caveats on all their stuff. Like, the law is so broken, nothing happens if they just don’t pay. Eventually your “win” can expire after 13 years or something and if you didn’t collect the money then it’s no longer collectible.
- bdauvergne 3y agoIt should take 1 or 2 months to get the money, it's nearly automatic even if the loser want to go again to "cours de cassation" (french 2nd circuit).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nolok 3y agoNot sure what country you are in, but in France if the other party is not going forward with it you use a "commissaire de justice", which is a regulated profession with special powers and will be able to seize money straight from the other party bank account (while taking a fee and a % for himself for his services). It works whether the other party is a legal or a moral person, they're also allowed to get inside their home or office and seize physical things, or even put a place for sale. See [1]. You need a "titre executoire", which a judgment in court is. If on the other hand you have a simple normal everyday contract and the customer isn't paying for it, you can ask the court for a titre executoire, where the other party can argue and the judge can check whether it was a real contract / you delivered / ... and if yes will give an order to pay -- it takes between 2 weeks and 3 months in my experience, if you get the titre and the other party still doesn't pay then you can use the commissaire de justice de seize from their account. If your contract is for a sum below 5000 you don't need to involve the court, only to have tried amical resolution before, and then the unpaid contractual debt act as a titre executoire by itself, that the commissaire can act on (though as that point the other party is allowed to involve a judge to protect themselves if needed or wanted). They usually send a notice to banks and banks have to return what accounts they own for said person, to allow the proportional seizure. Now this has limits of course, most importantly if the other party is insolvent, or if the commissaire cannot find their assets or they don't have any, etc ... But for a company like Orange, it's a non issue. This will be paid, one way or the other. [1] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F922 https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F922
- neilv 3y agoAnd the violation might've been even earlier (since the contract was 2005). 650K euros is not a lot of money for a big company in any year. Getting away with the violation for 14-19 years before losing an appeal and finally paying up just seems petty.
- yard2010 3y agoIt's easier to say sorry than ask for permission
- vram22 3y agoEAFP is the acronym, even used in Python. https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-EAFP https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-EAFP
- sidewndr46 3y agoIf I was a lawyer for this company, I'd be telling my boss we won. Decades of reselling something we didn't own for a pittance of a fine is a win in my book.
- bdauvergne 3y agoThey never reselled it, I have no proof of that but I'm pretty sure of it, in fact the use of this software stopped in 2016 when the french state site mon.service-public.fr stopped (see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon.service-public.fr https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon.service-public.fr), software was used from 2009 to 2016, by a french administration named DGME, so 7 years. Orange extended its own identity provider (used in their old ISP trademark "Wanadoo") which was some kind of proprietary SSO protocol a bit like CAS, and extended it with Lasso to deliver a real SAML identity provider for this project to French state); they never have any incentive to use it for themselves and they do not resell softwares anyway. The background of all that is only supposition from me (we participated to the same project as the contractor of another administration, la Caisse des dépôts et Consignation, but we were never inside the project of delivering Mon.Service-public.fr itself which was the project won by Orange Business Services and using Lasso), but I think it happened because an engineer was expected to deliver the software but its managers never asked him how he would do it, and at some point someone waved the problem of the license away because everything was too late anyway. It's just my own big corporation fiction, your mileage may vary.
- bdauvergne 3y agoHi, developper of Lasso from Entr'ouvert here (sorry for the english, I'm more used to talk about programming than french law): It took so much time for many reasons : * first the judge advised us to try to mitigate, mitigation failed because Orange/FranceTelecom did not want to mitigate anything (we asked in mitigation for nearly what we won in the end), * we returned in tribunal, and the judge asked for an expertise to see if really the fact that Orange linked their program with Lasso inside an Apache module was violating GPLv2, * we lost on first instance, * we made appeal and won but not on the counterfeiting accusation, only on some other kind of violation in French named "parasitism", the fact is french juridication doctrine on "licences" was that is was a contract, and only a contract and the could only invoke civil contract law and not use counterfeiting laws, * we did not agree with that, and neither did the european justice court, so we asked the french equivalent of the 2nd circuit (Cours de cassation) to overrule the court of appeal doctrine, * we won in the cours de cassation, * so we returned to the appeal court and we won. And here we are. The inefficiency come from many aspects : * french judiciary lacks money and resources, it's not new, everything is slow, budget of ministry of justice by citizen, is half or one third of the same budget is germany, but for specialized justice like counterfeiting of software, it's a special court, which should be faster than for usual civil law, * BUT france is not California, litigation about software licences and especially free software licence is extremely rare, and usually between commercial entities which have real contractual obligation between them, so that the court can concentrate on the commercial aspect (you owed so much, you had to deliver this and did not, etc...) here we did not have any commercial relation with Orange on this project (we had a long time ago on other project not related to the one for which they used Lasso) * ALSO france has very special doctrine called (in french) "non cumul de la responsabilité contractuelle et délictuelle", it means that if there is some kind of contract between you and a third party, that imposed them to not violate some law which can also be an offense/crime, the invoked responsibility can only coming from the contract and not from the offense/crime law (counterfeiting is an offense in France), so we had to break this doctrine in "Cours de cassation" before being authorized to litigate on counterfeiting.
- metafunctor 3y agoSo Orange won 12 years time to pay whatever you won in the end? That's a factor of about 2.2x, assuming 7% capital gains year-on-year. If the sums are large, it would've made a lot of sense for Orange to delay the decision for 12 years until having to pay. But I'm not sure at all of the sums here were that substantial.
- conradfr 3y agoJustice is very slow in France. Every year a lot of cases are closed because there's nobody to work on them.
- dv_dt 3y agoIt's slow for resolution on an individual instance, but if its establishing stronger precedent on all future situations then perhaps it's good that the details were tracked through.
- qingcharles 3y agoAre there any (democratic) countries where the courts run efficiently? I just waited in jail for 10 years in the USA for trial while the lawyers just got a series of continuances and then the prosecution dropped the case. So, the USA is definitely not exempt. I've had civil litigation go on for a decade in the USA too, which I don't think is uncommon. Sometimes you'll go around to an appellate court multiple times which adds, say, two years each time. If you look at death penalty cases in the USA it can take more than 20 years to exhaust all the appellate courts.
- Gerlo 3y agoWait, you were in jail for 10 years? What happened?
- stolsvik 3y agoWow. Did you get any compensation for those years?
- qingcharles 3y agoNo, sadly, where I live you only get compensated for being in prison after conviction. If you spend 10 years in pre-trial detention and are acquitted you are not eligible for compensation.