Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Downloads

Re:Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Dow... by sli on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @12:36PM (#16317824)

So basically Google looks at the terms of the software license that applies (GPLv3) and throws them out. Well that's a bit chilling.

My question is, would they fight to protect the GPL licensing of Android if someone infringed it? To be consistent, Google would have to say no, but it's going to be one hell of a hard sell to convince me that Google would let that go.

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Re:Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Dow... by dragonwriter on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @01:29PM (#16318242)

> My question is, would they fight to protect the GPL licensing of Android if someone infringed it?

Probably not in many cases; they only use GPL where upstream forces them to; for their own original unconstrained work they tend to prefer permissive licenses rather than copyleft. They are probably willing to let the upstream that is forcing the use of the GPL bear the burden of enforcing it if they are concerned, and happier still if they generally don't making it permissive-in-effect.

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Re:Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Dow... by metaphyze on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @12:41PM (#16317858)

I think the only part of Android that's under GPL is the Linux kernel. The rest is under the Apache license.

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