Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL
by toyg on Monday March 04, 2024 @04:35AM
(#39588562)
> Including code in your code would always be a copyright violation.
Well, not quite - shipping code with your code would be, because that is direct distributing. But if I ship a script to download your GPL library from PYPI and just use it as it comes, the argument on whether my application is a "derivative" of yours, is not an easy one.
Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL
by regularfry on Monday March 04, 2024 @05:11AM
(#39588768)
It's potentially not an easy one in law, but it is one that the GPL is explicitly intended to capture. The only question is whether it has successfully done so (and that actually depends on the specifics of the usage, as I understand it).
Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL
by lmm on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @02:57AM
(#39600533)
> Including code in your code would always be a copyright violation. The Oracle vs Google case is very different. The OP is talking about copying implementations while Oracle vs Google is about copying APIs.
Importing a module doesn't generally mean you include that module in your code. It only means you made use of that module's API. So whether that API was copyrightable is very much relevant.
The equivalent of Oracle vs Google here would be if you rewrote the exact same python module with exact same API names, but all your implementation was clean-room implementation. Here the question is, if the APIs themselves are copyrightable.