Centre/SIS GPL violated by The Miller Group

[Ed Wilts]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 07:39:00PM -0500, Andrew Schmadeke wrote:
> I am the author of Centre/SIS which is released under the GPL  
> license.  This has been distributed through a company I use to  
> consult for until December as well as freshmeat and versiontracker, etc.
> 
> This company is called The Miller Group (www.miller-group.net).  I  
> wrote the software as an independent contractor, and therefore own  
> the copyright.

The "therefore own the copyright" doesn't follow.  Just because you're
an independent contractor does not mean that you own the copyright.  The
laws vary from one place to another and it also depends on what was in
your contract.  It's quite possible that you do not own the copyrights
at all.

> Shortly after I stopped consulting for The Miller Group, they began  
> to try to sell a commercial license for Centre to another company.
> 
> I contacted The Miller Group telling them not to do this, and  
> explaining the violation. The Miller Group has not responded to this  
> letter.  Instead, they removed the copyright notices that contained  
> my name from the source code, and republished the software (under the  
> same version name).  This new copy of version 2.5 also contained a  
> new file called copyright that says:
> 
> /**
> * @version $Id: index.php,v 2.5 2005
> * @package Centre
> * @copyright (C) 2000 - 2005 The Miller Grouop
> * @license http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GNU/GPL
> * Centre is Free Software
> */
> 
> The Miller Group is also selling add-on modules which I wrote, but  
> never distributed.

Again, they may own the copyrights to these modules and may be perfectly
within their rights to sell these modules.

> I'm just a college student, and my lawyer tells me it would cost  
> between $10,000 and $20,000 to get an injunction.  What can I do?

First, do you have proof that you own the copyrights?  If not, you're
dead before you go any farther.  Did your contract state that you get to
keep the copyrights to all code that you developed for them?

        .../Ed
-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program