After two years, the SFC is escalating to "asking publicly". Wow, they really are great stewards of the copyrights which have been assigned to them!
"Justice delayed, is justice denied " is supposed to be one of the principles of jurisprudence, it seems to have been forgotten
These cases take years
In other parts of the (in)justice system people languish in jail, and on bail, waiting for their day in court.
The legal systems of Western "democracies " have become a money fountain, and are loosing the sense of justice
EDIT: I dug into it a little. SFC appears to be dug into a lawsuit against Vizio. It makes sense, even law firms have finite resources, and there’s some indication that the outcome of this lawsuit could give a clearer indication of the viability of a suit against John Deere. My original point on the time it takes to file a suit stands though.
Correct. Closing out the suit takes years. As was said:
> These cases take years
If you sue in a court of law, they will give you money damages, and maybe an injunction specifically requiring the developer delete their copy of the program. Under no circumstances will a court demand specific performance of GPL obligations to release source code. But that's what the SFC wants. So the only way to get people to comply with the GPL is to use the threat of a lawsuit to encourage compliance.
This is contrary to what we normally think of with copyright litigation, but that's mostly because the lawsuits we see are either breakdowns of negotiation, or against individual infringers and pirate sites that would never be granted a license under any circumstances whatsoever. When you want a licensee to actually do something, you are better off threatening litigation and negotiating rather than going straight to the nuclear option.
[0] Nobody told that to the Lawnmower Man[1] unfortunately
[1] Larry Ellison
I found the latest Conservancy lawsuit interesting, they are suing as a third-party beneficiary of the GPL (ie as a recipient of GPL code), not as a copyright holder. They are suing solely for compliance, not for damages. Hopefully they get back their costs too though.
I wonder why not though. If that’s the clear terms of the license, and there’s some implied consent when using a library, and others knowingly used the library with the right terms, why can’t the courts find it fair?
Basically, Atari wanted to port some old Humongous Entertainment games to Wii, they hired a contractor, who hired a contractor, who downloaded SCUMMVM and ported it to the Wii. Of course, Nintendo's SDK terms specifically forbid source code disclosure, and they did not disclose source code of their port of this emulator.
So if a court specifically compelled performance of the GPL's license obligations, then they'd also be compelling Atari to violate their agreement with Nintendo. So does Nintendo now get to sue Atari for being sued by SCUMMVM's development team and losing? Or does the court get to override Nintendo's NDAs to satisfy the GPL? What if they chose the opposite: overriding the GPL to preserve Nintendo's NDAs? Neither of those outcomes really jive with the core idea of copyright, because they all rely on having one infringed party "step on" the other's ownership, with courts having to decide who wins and loses.
So that's 15 months for a slam-dunk injunction. Today it wouldn't take as long since there's case law backing them up. But if the RIAA had spent 2 years sending emails and writing blog posts, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere either.
The other end of the spectrum might be an outcome like "Some GPL library authors find themselves suddenly owning a major farming machinery company". :)
The US copyright law is draconian, copyright violations are felony violations with 10 years prison and 100k$ fines, the Aaron Swartz taught us that.