Has the GPL really lost it's power that much? I mean not responding to inquiries is one thing, but outright saying no?
I dare say if this were a major manufacturer, more effort would be made to make them behave, but we're talking about a short-run switch here.
If there ever becomes a mechanism to DMCA-takedown physical products on an international level, we might see some movement here. But China (et al) would never, ever agree to that. It's hard enough to get them to block things that clearly break international safety standards.
Same applies for this device. If a mfg is infringing on copyright then shouldn't we have a mechanism to stop it from being imported?
It strikes me that we have two laws in this country. The laws for those with money/power (e.g. MPAA to protect US corporate media interests), and then those same laws that are not applied to protect consumers. Is the only difference that MPAA has lawyers to ensure copyright infringement stops while consumers don't?
This might actually do more to confirm than dispute your comment about "laws for those with money/power", though.
- Containers are MASSIVE. Seriously. You can fit hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of plug-sized widgets in a container.
- Millions of containers leave China every day.
- People lie about certification, provenance, component specs. Even if you do test one, the next 999,999 are probably all using shitty capacitors.
- There are many ports that don't all share data.
The only stuff that gets refused are where you have repeat offenders coming into the same port with the same dangerous stuff.
And yes, MPAA and other trademark bandits with all the cash can pay to police this stuff. It isn't fair... But I'm not sure the world would have the appetite for absorbing the costs in import tax. A testing container of plugs would push the price up way beyond $30 a unit and that's testing 1/1000.
Demanding certified manufacturing might be an option but that's expensive for China so they'll resist (or do a job equally shitty as the plugs they'd be supposed to police).
I'm sure you're a fine person who would keep paying but do you think everybody would because it's the right thing?
That's all that's happening here.
It's up to the copyright holder to enforce it.
¹I believe there are some exceptions, like having contributed only an insignificant fraction of the whole work.
Let's say you contributed 500 lines of code to some project. You sue somebody for violating GPL and not publishing their changes. The judge has to give them the choice : either pay damages or actually comply (another western legal principle : money buys your way out of anything, as long as it isn't criminal).
What damages to assign ? Well, seems reasonable to say "how much for 500 lines of code ? A week's wages ? Okay, 2500 dollar damages awarded". The other party might become scared because other developers could conceivably sue, but ...
1) are only available either during a trial or as a last resort (if you can make a good case the defendant won't pay even if the judge compels them)
2) you'd still have to prove more damage will be done if injunction isn't there. Those have to be real damages, with real monetary amounts on them.
This is western law, it's practical. Anything you do that either doesn't bother anyone, or you prevent damage from occuring is legal, no matter how much it is against (civil) law.
The fact that something violates copyright, by itself, is not sufficient to get anything done in court at all.
If it has "no clear copyright owner" because it comes from an entire community and has a ton of copyright holders for little bits of the code here and there, then it means that every copyright holder can sue for breach of copyright.
If on the other hand it has "no clear copyright owner" because it was written by one person under a pseudonym and that holder is almost surely never going to come forward to prove that they are the person intended... then it's de facto public domain even if that's not its status de jure. If you really want to push it in court, you can say that you met the person in-person at a conference and that they verbally told you to do anything you want with it: unless they stand up to say "that's a total lie!" there's no way of proving, because just because some code C has been licensed to a million people under the GPL, it doesn't mean it hasn't been licensed to one other person under the WTFPL.
As for how this could happen... It could be that everything suggests that they never want to come back, like the apparent disappearance from Earth of Satoshi Nakamoto; it could also be something with more stake, for example if Ross Ulbricht had gotten out of the Silk Road business and GPLed his code as the Dread Pirate Roberts before he was caught; in that hypothetical universe, nobody would want to prove that they were the DPR until some statute of limitations for running the black market had passed.
And that's a shitty thing to do which I 100% disagree with, but at least it gives lip service that they are doing something wrong. If what this reviewer says is true, the company just told him no.
That's not ignoring copyright/GPL, that's laughing in it's face.
Edit: BMW apparently did not do that, I probably read that somewhere that had an axe to grind...
It required a second request, and BMW's internal bureaucracy took some days (or weeks?), but they did fully comply.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/30/bmw_complies_with_gp...