On 12/15/2013 10:33 AM, Neil Brown wrote:
She has been negligent in her duties under the GPL, and she has in fact not
complied with the license,
and may in principle face a civil action from Bob - who cannot legally sell the
car he's bought.
She could also face possible criminal charges for copyright violation - this
seems vanishingly unlikely.
I am not persuaded by this, as I am not sure what restricted act of copyright
Alice performs when she transfers ownership of the car to Bob.
Unless Alice performs an act restricted by copyright, she does not require a
licence, and I don't see transferring a product containing embedded software as
an otherwise infringing act
This implies 'embedded' software has some special status in law, and
indeed that most of the messages
on this list about routers and other objects that do not come with
source are misguided, as the only
one with any obligation is the original manufacturer (and why then?).
I don't see any basis for this in what I know of copyright law.
The only permission Alice has to copy or distribute Linux comes from the
GPL * - it is explicitly laid down
that the authors only give permission according to the GPL (they are of
course free to licence it
otherwise).
In the case of a TV or a car bought new with no software licence
agreement it's not an
unreasonable position to take that the manufacturer has implicitly
licenced the software to any users
by the mere fact they are selling it.
Where the software has an explicit licence, it's hard to see how this
works - if I have a laptop, and I
install windows on it from bittorrent - and then sell this laptop - the
recipient doesn't magically get
a licenced copy of windows because I diddn't tell them it was unlicenced.
* and any fair use in copyright law that may apply.
