Re:VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation
by maxerickson on Saturday March 07, 2015 @05:43AM
(#9161552)
What do you mean by trolling?
It looks like a shitty, evidence free insinuation of dishonesty used as a rhetorical tactic, but that's a big assumption to make.
The only lawyers I find who agree with your position (and, BTW, they agree with it for completely different reasons than you state, and I suspect they wouldn't agree with your reading of v2 Section 6) are a few lawyers in Germany.
I thus find myself in the odd situation of having to defend your trolling a bit, because Till Jaeger, Christoph's lawyer in the VMware case, has indeed stated publicly that he believes you can regain a license under GPLv2 by coming into compliance and redownloading in Germany. However, this is likely specific to Germany because no other legal expert I've ever met who has studied this issue has argued it works anywhere else in the world.
This point is therefore salient insofar as this thread is discussing a copyright case in Germany. But, as I wrote in the copyleft.org footnote I referred to earlier, the issue is just an esoteric legal detail except in the case of proprietary relicensing business models. Community-oriented GPL Enforcement Organizations always restore rights anyway once the violator achieves compliance, so the final impact of both interpretations ends up the same in most enforcement actions, unless of course your goal is to abhorrently use strict termination to extort gobs of money, in which case, this detail matters a lot.