8.5: Enforcing the General Public Licence
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Maintaining the legal power and influence of the GPL has become the focus of one recent project, gplviolations.org (Welte, 2006a). This is a GPL watch-dog group founded by Harald Welte in 2004 (Welte, 2006b) whose actions to date have primarily focused on violations by businesses active in Germany and Holland, as well as the rest of Europe, although many of the parent companies may be elsewhere. Welte became concerned about GPL enforcement around 2003 when he discovered GPL’ed software he had written to work with the Linux kernel (netfilter/iptables) was being used by companies in a manner violating the licence (Welte, 2006b). According to the project site: “After some time … [Welte] discovered that the number of GPL violations was far bigger than expected, as is the number of Free Software projects whose copyrights are mistreated/ abused” (Welte, 2006b).
As Welte investigated, he found “more and more cases of infringement … mostly in the embedded networking market” (Welte, 2006b). By mid-2004, Welte’s project had secured its first preliminary injunction in favor of the GPL (Welte, 2006b). From there, Welte’s work branched out. He began to protect other developers’ GPL’ed work that was similarly abused (Welte, 2006b). He gained financial backing from Linux developers like Werner Almesberger and Paul “Rusty” Russell who “transferred their rights in a fiduciary license agreement to enable the successful gpl-violations.org project to enforce the GPL” (Welte, 2006b). The companies that gpl-violations.org claim have violated GPL terms are not necessarily small companies. On March 14, 2005, Welte delivered a warning letter to 13 companies, among which were listed Motorola and Acer (Welte, 2005/2006). In September 2006, the organization won a case against D-Link Germany GmbH, a subsidiary of Taiwan’s D-Link Corporation (Welte, 2006c). Other cases, settled out of court, have involved “Siemens, Fujitsu-Siemens, Asus and Belkin” (Welte, 2004/2006). As of June 2006, Welte’s project claimed successful completion of 100 infringement cases: “Every GPL infringement that we started to enforce was resolved in a legal success, either in-court or out of court” (Welte, 2006b).
In a 2006 legal case of another sort (amended from earlier actions), David Wallace claimed that the FSF— through the GPL—was acting as a monopoly with regard to operating systems under the US Sherman Anti-Trust Act (Wallace v. Free Software Foundation, Inc., March 20, 2006). In an ironic twist, Wallace charged that the GPL was “foreclosing competition in the market for computer operating systems” (Wallace v. Free Software Foundation, Inc., March 20, 2006, p. 2). In reviewing the complaint, the court found that Wallace’s “problem … [appeared] to be that GPL generates too much competition, free of charge” (Wallace v. Free Software Foundation, Inc., March 20, 2006, p. 5). In reviewing the nature of the GPL and the GNU/Linux licensing under this agreement, the court found, “the GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation” (Wallace v. Free Software Foundation, Inc., March 20, 2006, p. 5). As Tai (2004) wrote, “The recent attacks on the GPL … demonstrate how far the GPL’s influences have come, but we may not have seen the full impact of the GPL yet”.