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Can't GPL authors petition the court to see? ... elsewhere too ...? | 264 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Can't GPL authors petition the court to see? ... elsewhere too ...?
Authored by: tknarr on Thursday, December 13 2012 @ 07:26 PM EST

Well, in this case you would have open statements by one of the parties that the agreement covers a product that can be shown to contain my code. Note that I can't demand access to their agreement. What I can demand is either that access, for the purpose of determining whether or not their agreement causes one party to breach their obligations to me regarding my code, or alternatively to have both parties state in a legally binding fashion that the patents in question are not practiced by my code. The catch there is that if the infringing code were really mine, then if either of those parties later tries to sue anyone else I can jump up waving that statement and go "Hold on here, they already said my code doesn't practice their patents, so how can it infringe upon them?". You can imagine what'd happen if a large number of the copyright holders of the GPL'd code in Android made such a demand.

It wouldn't even be necessary to ask that the agreement be allowed to be made public. If none of the copyright holders turned around and took legal action, we'd know the patents didn't touch on the GPL'd code. And if the patents did, at least some of the copyright holders would be taking action over the GPL violation.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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