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Title    GPL as a Contract Survives Summary Judgement
Date    Thursday October 12 2017, @02:41AM
Author    Fnord666
Topic   
from the by-reading-this-department-you-agree-to-the-following dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/10/11/213252

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A motion for Summary Judgement in the ongoing Artefix v. Hancom GPL enforcement case has been denied. Seen previously on Soylent. From the FSF:

In the previous ruling, the judge in the case had denied a motion to dismiss those claims, allowing the case to proceed. We've now reached the next step in the suit, involving a motion for summary judgment on the contract claim, which was also denied. In a motion to dismiss, the court assumes the truth of the allegations involved and rules on whether such allegations actually present a valid legal claim. In summary judgment, the court is asked to look at the undisputed facts and determine whether the outcome is so obvious that the matter need not go through a full trial. Such motions are routine, but making it past summary judgment does mean that the issue of recovery under contract theory is still alive in this case.

Hancom here made several arguments against the contract claim, but one is of particular interest. Hancom argued that if any contract claim is allowed, damages should only be considered prior to the date of their initial violation. They argued that since the violation terminated their license, the contract also ended at that point. The judge noted that:

the language of the GPL suggests that Defendant's obligations persisted beyond termination of its rights to propagate software using Ghostscript ... because the source code or offer of the source code is required each time a "covered work" is conveyed, each time Defendant distributed a product using Ghostscript there was arguably an ensuing obligation to provide or offer to provide the source code.


Original Submission

Links

  1. "Seen" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/05/19/1941215
  2. "previously" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/09/09/1937218
  3. "the FSF" - http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/update-on-artifex-v-hancom-gnu-gpl-compliance-case-1
  4. "motion for summary judgment" - https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3:2016cv06982/305835/54
  5. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=22713

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printed from SoylentNews, GPL as a Contract Survives Summary Judgement on 2024-05-13 23:16:11