Free software Germany GPL

Rui Miguel Seabra rms at 1407.org
Wed Jul 2 11:17:43 UTC 2003


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
-- 
+ No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown
+ Whatever you do will be insignificant,
| but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi
+ So let's do it...?

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