The SFLC has filed an infringement suit captioned “ERIK ANDERSEN, an
individual, and ROB LANDLEY, an individual v. HIGH-GAIN ANTENNAS, L.L.C.”
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/nov/20/busybox/highgainantennas.pdf
The SFLC alleged in the complaint in part:
"8. Under the License, Plaintiffs grant certain permissions to other
parties to copy, modify and redistribute BusyBox so long as those
parties satisfy certain conditions. In particular, Section 2(b) of the
License, addressing each licensee, states:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or
in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to
be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms
of this License. . .
15. Upon information and belief, on August 5, 2006, Defendants were
notified by a third party of the relevant terms of the GPL and
Defendant’s infringement thereof. This notification was provided via an
e-mail requesting the complete and corresponding source code of the
GPL-licensed software on an Infringing Product."
The designated donee beneficiaries of the GPL are obviously "all third
parties". Clearly the plaintiffs are "parties" to the GPL contract and
cannot be a member of the class "all third parties." Therefore the
plaintiffs can suffer no injury by the source code not being made
available to "all third parties".
The Supreme Court in 1975 ruled:
"Apart from this minimum constitutional mandate, this Court has
recognized other limits on the class of persons who may invoke the
courts' decisional and remedial powers. First, the Court has held that
when the asserted harm is a "generalized grievance" shared in
substantially equal measure by all or a large class of citizens, that
harm alone normally does not warrant exercise of jurisdiction. Second,
even when the plaintiff has alleged injury sufficient to meet the "case
or controversy" requirement, this Court has held that the plaintiff
generally must assert his own legal rights and interests, and cannot
rest his claim to relief on the legal rights or interests of third
parties." Warth v. Seldin 422 U.S. 490 (1975)
http://72.41.57.74/standing.html
The only people with legal "standing" to complain about a violation of
the GPL are the third party donee beneficiaries.
ROFL :)
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