Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Downloads | Hacker News Reader

Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Downloads

torrentfreak.com

38 pointsghostDancer13 comments

So basically Google looks at the terms of the software license that applies (GPLv3) and throws them out. Well that's a bit chilling.

My question is, would they fight to protect the GPL licensing of Android if someone infringed it? To be consistent, Google would have to say no, but it's going to be one hell of a hard sell to convince me that Google would let that go.

I think the only part of Android that's under GPL is the Linux kernel. The rest is under the Apache license.

> My question is, would they fight to protect the GPL licensing of Android if someone infringed it?

Probably not in many cases; they only use GPL where upstream forces them to; for their own original unconstrained work they tend to prefer permissive licenses rather than copyleft. They are probably willing to let the upstream that is forcing the use of the GPL bear the burden of enforcing it if they are concerned, and happier still if they generally don't making it permissive-in-effect.

This seems easily resolvable via a DMCA infringement claim, but there’s no mention of one in the article. Perhaps the copyright owner (i.e. Kempf or his agent) didn’t file one? The process is pretty straightforward.

Not a rhetorical question: it seem to me that google becoming a despicable company; does anyone have a view on this?

I live in fear https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12062807

Oh wow. The screenshot with the large text the guy says "Google's free products shouldn't be used for business." Yikes.

How can we be sure that we have the correct VLC app?

The article is about how they copycat app makes no mention of vlc or their gpl requirements, so while there's no guarantee you have the official vlc version, if it mentions vlc in the name you don't have this one.

I may be wrong but doesn’t GPL (any version) simply require that source code be made available to customers on request, rather than pro-actively?

As it stands the developers don’t appear to have actively refused to provide source code - it might be premature to call them out for breaking the terms of the license.

Edit: My interpretation above appears to be correct in so far as you don’t have to make the source code proactively available (unlike what Video LANs President claimed in the article)

>Moreover, they don’t seem to share the source at all, which is also a violation.”

But there is still the requirement to include the license to inform the user of their rights. Unfortunately the article doesn’t seem to explicitly say whether there’s a licensee tucked into eg the About screen from the screenshot.

IANAL but assuming there is, then the developers here could still be in the clear?

You have to offer the source code. It's in section 6, more specifically parts D or E apply since it's distributed over the network.

Option D:

> Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge (...)

or option E...

> Convey the object code using peer-to-peer transmission, provided you inform other peers where the object code and Corresponding Source of the work are being offered (...)

Also, in section 5e:

> The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License

This is pretty blatantly violating these terms.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

Hmm interesting, that's a subtle change between gplv2 and v3 I was unaware of, thanks!

For completeness, GPLv3 has the following option available:

>c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.

Whilst the equivilent in v2 ( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html ) is

> b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, [next clause]

Which is a lot less restrictive over when you can use the written offer approach.

You have to offer the source code to the people you give the binaries to. For example, if your product isn’t free, you only owe source code to those who you sell your product to (assuming that’s exhaustively who you distribute it to). You don’t have to offer the source code to everyone in the world, nor to the authors of the parent work in particular.

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