> Entr’Ouvert sued Orange in 2010
How such a simple thing could take 14 years to untangle?
How could anyone trust in courts that have such a spectacular efficiency?
How such a simple thing could take 14 years to untangle?
How could anyone trust in courts that have such a spectacular efficiency?
It took so much time for many reasons :
* first the judge advised us to try to mitigate, mitigation failed because Orange/FranceTelecom did not want to mitigate anything (we asked in mitigation for nearly what we won in the end),
* we returned in tribunal, and the judge asked for an expertise to see if really the fact that Orange linked their program with Lasso inside an Apache module was violating GPLv2,
* we lost on first instance,
* we made appeal and won but not on the counterfeiting accusation, only on some other kind of violation in French named "parasitism", the fact is french juridication doctrine on "licences" was that is was a contract, and only a contract and the could only invoke civil contract law and not use counterfeiting laws,
* we did not agree with that, and neither did the european justice court, so we asked the french equivalent of the 2nd circuit (Cours de cassation) to overrule the court of appeal doctrine,
* we won in the cours de cassation,
* so we returned to the appeal court and we won.
And here we are.
The inefficiency come from many aspects : * french judiciary lacks money and resources, it's not new, everything is slow, budget of ministry of justice by citizen, is half or one third of the same budget is germany, but for specialized justice like counterfeiting of software, it's a special court, which should be faster than for usual civil law,
* BUT france is not California, litigation about software licences and especially free software licence is extremely rare, and usually between commercial entities which have real contractual obligation between them, so that the court can concentrate on the commercial aspect (you owed so much, you had to deliver this and did not, etc...) here we did not have any commercial relation with Orange on this project (we had a long time ago on other project not related to the one for which they used Lasso)
* ALSO france has very special doctrine called (in french) "non cumul de la responsabilité contractuelle et délictuelle", it means that if there is some kind of contract between you and a third party, that imposed them to not violate some law which can also be an offense/crime, the invoked responsibility can only coming from the contract and not from the offense/crime law (counterfeiting is an offense in France), so we had to break this doctrine in "Cours de cassation" before being authorized to litigate on counterfeiting.
That's a factor of about 2.2x, assuming 7% capital gains year-on-year.
If the sums are large, it would've made a lot of sense for Orange to delay the decision for 12 years until having to pay.
But I'm not sure at all of the sums here were that substantial.
Why would you assume 7% year on year? Did you look into Orange's stock price or quarterly/yearly reports, or did you think all companies have the same return as investing in the S&P500 would have?
https://www.boursorama.com/cours/1rPORA/
e.g. over 10 years, their stock price is roughly the same as it was back then after a few years slightly higher.
Thanks for the explanation, I think it's very clear in English.
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=Merci%20pou...
Also I assume "mitigation" is "settlement"?
I don't think there's an exact translation.
Minor note: not really the French equivalent of the 2nd circuit
US (federal) courts are like: district, appeals (e.g. 2nd circuit, 9th circuit, cafc, etc), supreme. The circuit courts are all on the same level, they don't hand cases between each other.
French court has another layer in there? And moreover, it's not geographically separated, but rather by subject matter? (US has only one such court, the cafc).
E.g. you can't remand from 2nd circuit down to an appeals court, because there is no appeals court underneath the 2nd circuit.
But you also can't say that court is like the supreme court, because there is a constitutional court above it, which is the analogy to the US supreme court
Rulings of the Cassation court are usually applicable as case law, which is much less common in continental legal systems than it is in Common Law legal systems.
By the way, the French legal system has two main circuits ("orders") : the judiciary order (penal and civil) and the administrative law order, which handles disputes and trials between government entities (local, regional, or national), and between government entities and private entities (in most cases). The equivalent of the Cassation court in the administrative order is the Conseil d'Etat.
I'm just psyched to learn it has multiple separate subject-matter segregated appeals courts. Always looked like a saner approach than geographically separating circuit courts. Get judges with more specialized expertise in various areas.
The above events illustrate this a bit by how they lost on first instance because the system assumed that cases are about commercial entities which has contractual obligation between them. It took the supreme-like court that is specialized on legal procedures, rather than a court specialized on contract, to see the issue in the correct context.
In the US there is that problem somewhat, with the cafc. But probably <50%, it also has a lot of academics and government lawyers too.
At some point, if the US Supreme Court steps in (which they don't have to), one reasoning gets picked (or yet another one cooked up) which then stands for all regions and the courts are then strongly dissuaded from screwing with it any further.
did you also get your legal fees paid for, which is often a thing in various European lands - not sure in France?
Like, the law is so broken, nothing happens if they just don’t pay. Eventually your “win” can expire after 13 years or something and if you didn’t collect the money then it’s no longer collectible.
You need a "titre executoire", which a judgment in court is. If on the other hand you have a simple normal everyday contract and the customer isn't paying for it, you can ask the court for a titre executoire, where the other party can argue and the judge can check whether it was a real contract / you delivered / ... and if yes will give an order to pay -- it takes between 2 weeks and 3 months in my experience, if you get the titre and the other party still doesn't pay then you can use the commissaire de justice de seize from their account.
If your contract is for a sum below 5000 you don't need to involve the court, only to have tried amical resolution before, and then the unpaid contractual debt act as a titre executoire by itself, that the commissaire can act on (though as that point the other party is allowed to involve a judge to protect themselves if needed or wanted).
They usually send a notice to banks and banks have to return what accounts they own for said person, to allow the proportional seizure.
Now this has limits of course, most importantly if the other party is insolvent, or if the commissaire cannot find their assets or they don't have any, etc ... But for a company like Orange, it's a non issue.
This will be paid, one way or the other.
[1] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F922
0: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/what-to-do-if-a-d...
650K euros is not a lot of money for a big company in any year.
Getting away with the violation for 14-19 years before losing an appeal and finally paying up just seems petty.
The background of all that is only supposition from me (we participated to the same project as the contractor of another administration, la Caisse des dépôts et Consignation, but we were never inside the project of delivering Mon.Service-public.fr itself which was the project won by Orange Business Services and using Lasso), but I think it happened because an engineer was expected to deliver the software but its managers never asked him how he would do it, and at some point someone waved the problem of the license away because everything was too late anyway. It's just my own big corporation fiction, your mileage may vary.
If I made $100k / yr, this is like fighting in court for two decades over $1.
[1] "Orange S.A. Consolidated financial statements", https://gallery.orange.com/finance#l=row&lang=en&om=eeeb89fa...
The fact that it goes the same in other countries also doesn't help. The system is broken everywhere, that's all.
For the US, the right to a speedy trial is for criminal cases, not civil. And I don't think breaking software licenses is a criminal act unless a mass of damages were done. That's basically the logic that LLM's are working off of right now; get into dubious lawsuits and become top of the food chain by the time the litigation settles.
Heck, quite a few pieces of tech work that way. Lootboxes came and went in western video games before it even had time to be challenged.
In France the supreme court's role isn't tied to the constitution, just the law. They're to dictate which ways the law is to be interpreted and homogenize the decisions by the different lower courts.
We have a different (actually, two...) administrative organs that ensure that the law follows the constitution
- serving as the supreme court for the administrative "order" - as a judge, the CE does not check if laws are constitutionnal
- serving as legal counsel to the government - in which case it does check if bills put forward by the governement (i.e. not laws already adopted) are constitutionnal but this is merely advisory.
FWIW, the U.S. Supreme Court also has this role. People focus more on their constitutional cases because those are the most impactful/famous, but a lot of their workload is just interpreting normal laws, especially ones that have diverged among the various lower courts.
They have proportionately more constitutional cases because a case hitting the SCOTUS needs to be re-appealed at least twice, and the SCOTUS needs to choose to accept the case (4 out of 9 of the judges to be precise). The SCOTUS only takes a few dozen cases a year, so whatever remains tends to be larger issues.
But yes, very few cases are going to be Brown vs. the Board of Education levels of impactful. Perusing some cases of 2023 reveal one such case "simply" being:
>A case in which the Court will decide whether the "serious drug offense" definition in the Armed Career Criminal Act incorporates the federal drug schedules that were in effect at the time of the federal firearm offense or the federal drug schedules that were in effect at the time of the prior state drug offense.
Basically a bookkeeping case due to the different states as of late re-defining "serious drugs"
It deals with lots of constitutional issues, but Congress could basically just defund it and remit constitutional complaints to other venues if they wanted to. This is done in part with FISA and other national security measures. Congress deemed there to be no venue in the courts for a complaint.
I've heard stories that India was the worst with some cases passing down through generations over 50 60 70 years.
I just waited in jail for 10 years in the USA for trial while the lawyers just got a series of continuances and then the prosecution dropped the case. So, the USA is definitely not exempt. I've had civil litigation go on for a decade in the USA too, which I don't think is uncommon. Sometimes you'll go around to an appellate court multiple times which adds, say, two years each time.
If you look at death penalty cases in the USA it can take more than 20 years to exhaust all the appellate courts.
Every year a lot of cases are closed because there's nobody to work on them.