First Update on the Vizio Lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

First Update on the Vizio Lawsuit

sfconservancy.org

32 pointsaendruk9 comments

While I fully support the Software Freedom Conservancy's aims, this blog post makes zero sense and misconstrues what Vizio is doing in court.

Removal of a case from a State court to Federal court is a routine procedural matter. It's merely an attempt for a party to get into a court that might be more favorable to their arguments. Either party can file a removal request, and it happens all the time.

Its clear from the document Vizio submitted that the intent of Vizio is to kill the ability of third parties to sue over GPL violations by convincing the court to turn the state court breach of contract claim into a federal court copyright violation claim, which can presumably only brought by copyright holders. Thats basically what the Conservancy post means by "Vizio's belief that consumers have no third-party beneficiary rights under copyleft". The rest of the post follows directly from that.

OK, but a FRCP 12(b)(6) motion (or its CA law equivalent) to dismiss the breach of contract claim can be heard in either court, as can adjudication upon the merits of the claim itself. The change-of-venue motion is orthogonal to that.

Hmm, the LWN comments (link in another comment) seem to indicate that contract law is a state thing and copyright law a federal thing.

They are, but Federal cases can be adjudicated in State courts (though they rarely are); and State law breach-of-contract claims can be adjudicated in Federal courts.

We've been looking for a new TV; won't be considering Vizio anymore. Then again, their data collection practices are expansive enough that we probably would have gone elsewhere, anyways.

Or better yet, get a dumb TV since all "smart" TV's are basically spyware at least to me and I'm sure others feel the same.

It wouldn't surprise me if most TV vendors have similar GPL violations, best check them before purchasing one.

Some more comments are on the LWN post about this:

https://lwn.net/Articles/877294/#Comments

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