[rt.gpl-violations.org #2406] GPL violation on BongoSurfer

[Peter Roozemaal]

Hello Pascal,

As far as I know Harald Welte has been pretty successful in Germany. If
you go to the gpl-violations.org website you see some reports of the
successes he scored. However, most are unreported because the
distributor made a promise to the authors to change its life.

Your position is pretty strong and I think it is unlikely that you will
have to go to court to get justice. However it is good to get some help
from an attorney if you are not familiar with writing a formal letter.

Peter.

Pascal wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> thank you for your answer Clemens :)
> 
>> Did they only change the program name (perfectly legal), or did they
>> remove information about the original author(s) (_very_ illegal)?
>>   
> they did not remove information about us, but our names are now written
> in a context were they should not be (for example below passages of the
> documentation we didn't write). Another example is this page:
> http://colorsurfer.software.informer.com
> I'm not a developer of ColorSurfer!
> 
>> The ISP versions are distributed by the ISPs, so it's they who are
>> responsible for distributing/offering the source code.
> thank you, good to know. I'm not sure the ISPs even know that the prog
> is GPL.
> 
>> It's possible that "First Internet Invest Ltd" does not have enough
>> assets to pay your expenses and damages, but it might be possible to
>> make the CEO personally liable (since it looks as if he did the
>> violation).
>>   
> does somebody know about previous legal actions against GPL violations
> in germany?
> I must admit that we don't have a clue about legal matter, we're just
> hobby programmers. But we think that the GPL should be protected, we put
> much effort in this piece of free software, and what we want is that the
> software remains free. The question is how far we are willing to go in
> proceedings, because we are not aware of the (financial) risks we would
> take.
> I would be satisfied if we could exert enough pressure on the company to
> force them to release the sources or to abandon their program.
> 
>> Try asking in a newsgroup like de.soc.recht.misc.
> I'll remember, thanks.
> 
> 
> best regards,
> Pascal
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> Pascal wrote:
>>   
>>> The programs are not really functional, because they obviously did bad
>>> things like sed 's/bongosurfer/colorsurfer/g' on the sources, but that's
>>> another story ;)
>>>     
>> Did they only change the program name (perfectly legal), or did they
>> remove information about the original author(s) (_very_ illegal)?
>>
>>   
>>> All the sources were only for the major release of colorsurfer.
>>> Despite our requests, we didn't receive any sources for the derived
>>> versions sold to the ISPs mentioned above.
>>>     
>> The ISP versions are distributed by the ISPs, so it's they who are
>> responsible for distributing/offering the source code.
>>
>>   
>>> How long should we wait to get the complete sources of ColorSurfer and
>>> all it's derivatives?
>>>     
>> Whatever is appropriate for this task.  ;-)
>>
>>   
>>> What would be the next step to take if our requests fail?
>>>     
>> Talk to a lawyer and sue them.
>>
>> It's possible that "First Internet Invest Ltd" does not have enough
>> assets to pay your expenses and damages, but it might be possible to
>> make the CEO personally liable (since it looks as if he did the
>> violation).  Try asking in a newsgroup like de.soc.recht.misc.
>>
>>
>> HTH
>> Clemens
>>
>>
>>   
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>