Fwd: GPL lawsuit in Germany

[John Tapsell]

Hello,

I appologise if I am sending this to the wrong people.
I am forwarding an email that we (fsf europe) have recieved.


Thank you for your time.

John Tapsell
FSF Europe member


----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: GPL lawsuit in Germany
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 23:17:44 +0100 (MET)
From: Joerg Schilling <schilling at fokus.gmd.de>
To: Discussion at fsfeurope.org

Hi all,

one of my GPL programs is abused by a German company and I am going to sue
 them soon. I like to report from a talk I had with my lawyer today.

He told me that GPL cannot be enforced in Germany.

He said, that to have a valid contract, there is a need that both
parties aggree in the contract which is not the case for the GPL.
So if the abuser tells you that he never aggreed in GPL and that
he _knows_ that is is using th eprogram in an illegal way, this will
help him in the lawsuit.

My questions:

-	Has there been ever a GPL lawsiut?

-	Is FSFeurope willing and able to help me and my lawyer?

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
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