(http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080813-court-violating-copyleft-copyright-infringement.html)
Very clear article about the differences between breach of contract and infringing a copyright. ===== Court: violating copyleft = copyright infringement By Timothy B. Lee | Published: August 13, 2008 - 09:10PM CT A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. [...] [C]opyright holders can typically obtain injunctions against continued use of their works, whereas the winning party in a contract dispute more commonly receives monetary damages. That's problematic for free software because it's difficult to compute the monetary value of software that is given away free of charge. As a result, many violations of copyleft licenses could have been punished with small fines that would amount to little more than a slap on the wrist. [...] It's important to distinguish between this case and the other cases on software licensing that Ars has covered recently. Like this week's decision, those cases were focused in part on whether copyright licenses would be enforced via contract law or copyright law. However, there was a crucial difference between those cases and this one: the first-sale doctrine, which says that selling a given copy of a work exhausts the copyright holder's rights with respect to that copy. In the previous cases, the dispute was over a single copy of the work—a promo CD in one case and a box of software in the other. The courts held that no license was needed in those cases because under the first sale doctrine, the lawful owners of those copies didn't need any further permission to use them. This week's case, on the other hand, involves a firm that was creating and distributing new copies of a work, a situation in which the first-sale doctrine simply doesn't apply. ===== -- Soh Kam Yung my Google Reader Shared links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16851815156817689753) my Google Reader Shared SFAS links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/16851815156817689753/label/sfas) _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
