On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 11:50, Onno Timmerman wrote:
On Slashdot it stated that in Germany GPL isn't legal. Is this true? http://www.vsi.de/inhalte/aktuell/studie_final.pdf http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/07/02/0245228.shtml?tid=117&tid=99 And if so what legal work should be done to make it legal. If somebody knows if any resaerch has be done in Belgium I would welcome it and try to get a new law in act that make GPL very wel protected.
From what I could understand from a (bad) translation of an article at Heise, the legality dubiousness seemed pretty dubious to me. It seemed to rely on responsability of the developers.
My questions are: Isn't copyright holder responsability _always_ a fact? With typical proprietary software companies, the official copyright holder is usually the company. The article mentions developers, but I'd guess that that is only because _they_ are the copyright holders and not some company (phew).
The GNU GPL and LGPL licenses are, by several orders of intergalactic magnitude, far less restrictive than most non-free licenses. If a licence such as the GNU GPL or LGPL couldn't be enforced, what about all the others that add restrictions to normal copyright law?
What happens when a license is non valid in Germany? It would seem to me that if a license is invalid then you have no right to the copy you have, but IANAL.
Regards, Rui