GPL lawsuit in Germany

[Joerg Schilling]

>From joao at silvaneves.org Fri Jan 25 00:35:45 2002


>On Qui, 2002-01-24 at 23:19, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>> >From joao at 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 at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de		(uni)  If you don't have iso-8859-1
       schilling at 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