Beware The CopyLEFT Trolls (Techdirt)

I'm not sure that's sufficient, depending on how the software is packaged. Take the MIT license for example:

> Permission is hereby granted, [snip], subject to the following conditions:
>
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

If you distribute copies of the software which do not actually include any documentation (e.g. because you have a separate foo-doc package, and the user can choose to install that independently of foo), then you are not complying with the literal wording of this requirement ("...included in ALL copies or substantial portions of the Software"). This is why Android* (and many similar products) has a screen buried deep in its Settings app which will actually display all of these licenses directly on the device; they are permanently bundled with the software itself, and not a separate component that you can "forget" to provide.

* Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't have anything to do with Android.

As the article says, old versions of CC licences revoked permission if you violated the terms. New versions instead give you time to fix things when alerted. But a lot of stuff is out there under the old versions of the licences, and the trolls are having the permissions revoked and shaking them down for money.

Another remedy is to ship corresponding source code even if you don't have to, in theory. In practice, it seems to be the only way.

For example, a lot of Javascript libraries are licensed under MIT/HPND variants, and their upstreams offer pre-minified downloads which do not comply with the license notification requirements. It's unclear what that means for the notification requirement. Figuring this out on a case-by-case basis and extracting all required notifications from source code is a hopeless task. Hence my recommendation to simply ship the source code.

I don't know whether the "virality" of GPL has ever been tested in court. If you have a GPL program and you include a small MIT-licensed piece from elsewhere, yes, you can GPL the whole thing as long as the MIT part is attributed. But can you just add 10 lines to an MIT-licensed codebase and GPL the whole thing? That would not look like a derived work of a GPL'd work, so arguably should not be GPL'd. A decent person wouldn't do that: if contributing to an MIT-licensed project, you would use the same licence. But would it even be legal? I doubt it.

And of course you can't just stick a new licence on without doing anything else. You can't fork FreeBSD and put it under the GPL. It is all protected by copyright, and the GPL licence covers your original work and derived works, not something that is entirely somebody else's work.

Posted Dec 21, 2021 9:07 UTC (Tue) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

But can you just add 10 lines to an MIT-licensed codebase and GPL the whole thing?

Why not? I think you can even do it without adding anything. You would still have to comply with the attribution requirements of the MIT license. But of course someone who prefers the MIT lincense will get his copy from somewhere without the GPL.

Does adding 10 lines change this situation? It depends if the 10 lines are significant wrt copyright, or if adding the 10 lines results in a compilation copyright. If neither, just take the 10 lines and add them to the MIT-licensed version.

A decent person wouldn't do that: if contributing to an MIT-licensed project, you would use the same licence.

So you claim that a decent person treats the MIT license as a copyleft license. But isn't the point of permissive licenses that it allows redistribution under other licenses? Maybe the anti-copyleft people need to work out a license that allow redistribution under proprietary licenses, but not under copyleft licenses.

the GPL licence covers your original work and derived works, not something that is entirely somebody else's work.

Yes, if there are no significant (wrt copyright) contributions by you in the work, you will have a hard time enforcing license compliance in court (the case will probably be thrown out because you have no legal standing), but that does not mean that you cannot redistribute the work with the GPL slapped on.

Given the outcome of Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMWare, I wonder how a typical proprietary program consisting of permissively licensed components would fare if similarly tested. Maybe the company can claim compilation copyright over the collection of permissively licensed code that they distribute with a little glue.

Beware The CopyLEFT Trolls (Techdirt)