Charging the net....

[Brian Thomson]

In article <QQXAZ86 at xds13.ferranti.com> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <sean.672356159 at s.ms.uky.edu> sean at ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
>> Traditionally, anything one
>> picked up from Usenet could be used without fear of litigation.
>
>Under the current version of the GPL, there are tools that have been
>distributed over Usenet that can not be freely used without fear of
>litigation. The difference between these programs and shareware has
>nothing to do with lawsuits and everything to do with money.

But have any competent legal opinions been expressed over the
effective enforceability of the GPL?  By this I mean the following:

* please bear in mind here that I am not a lawyer and mine is
  not one of the competent legal opinions I talked about *

A legal remedy for copyright violation is the payment of damages,
and the usual legal principle (as I understand it) for assessment of
damages is that the injured party should be put in the same financial
position it would have been in had the appropriate per-copy fees been
paid.  But, since Gnu stuff is distributed for free anyway, the
copyright holders do not suffer financially from violations, so the
result of such a suit might well be a finding for the complainant
in the amount of $0.  Although, I suppose that individual might seek
an injunction instead, or in addition; I have no feeling for how
this would fare, or whether or not costs might be awarded.

Whenever the subjects of licensing, restrictions, or copyright surface
on the net (and they do so with remarkable frequency), there are those
who brandish the courts, and flail away in all directions with rumours
and threats of Litigation-with-a-capital-L.  I have often wondered
whether there is anything substantive to it. I tend to feel that
its a bogey, and that the Gnu authors (and perhaps the shareware-on-Usenet
authors, too) realistically just have to hope that their audience 
is made up of decent folks.
-- 
		    Brian Thomson,	    CSRI Univ. of Toronto
		    utcsri!uthub!thomson, thomson at hub.toronto.edu