From joao@silvaneves.org Fri Jan 25 00:35:45 2002
On Qui, 2002-01-24 at 23:19, Joerg Schilling wrote:
From joao@silvaneves.org Thu Jan 24 23:32:34 2002 On Qui, 2002-01-24 at 22:17, Joerg Schilling wrote:
If someone abuses your code you may sue this person and will get you righ=
t in a=20
way so the abusing person hast to give you money later (enforced by the c=
ourt).
This is because you cannot enforce a license agreement if not both partie=
s
agreed on it. =20
(I'm assuming that Germany autorship/copyright law has something in common with the USA, Portuguese and Spanish ones. I'm almost convinced that's not always so...)
Authorship law in Portugal defines that you can't modify the work protected by copyright unless the author has given you permission to do so. This means that they are in one of 2 positions: They didn't asked for your permission, and so they've commited a crime, or they've accepted the GPL as your permission and, by not obliging to it, they've also commited a crime. Obviously I'm not a lawyer, just an engineer who has read too many legislation (including some international "copyright" treaties).
This looks similar and IO am sure that German and Portuguese copyright law have more in common than german and USA Copyright.
Of course, there are two aspects of the case. One is the civil acspect of the case and another is the crimnal aspect. Going only the way of sueing for the criminal aspect will take many years while starting with the civil case before will help to get a fast start.
The main problem seems that my lawyer does not see a way to enforce the other person to publish the modifications.
Jörg
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1 schilling@fokus.gmd.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix