Centre/SIS GPL violated by The Miller Group

[Ryan Thoryk]

Do you own a federally registered copyright for the software? (that would 
help out your situation a great deal).

Ryan Thoryk
Unix and Network Specialist
ryan at tliquest.net


On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> --Andrew Schmadeke
>
>