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Friday, September 22, 2006

German Court Uphelds GNU GPL.

A German regional court in Frankfurt/Main (

Landgericht Frankfurt/Main [in German only, sorry]) has confirmed that the GNU GPL can be enforced under German Law. In a recent

Decision 2-6 O 224/06 the Court ordered a manufacturer of stand-alone Internet appliances to pay a certain amount of damage compensation to a programmer who had created software distributed under the GNU GPL. The software had been incorporated in the devices sold by the defendant without distributing the source code as required by the GNU GPL. This is, as fas as I know, the first case ever where the GNU GPL was successfully enforced in Germany by a decision given not only in summary proceedings but as a result of a full trial. For more details, see

Kristian Köhntopps Blog [in German, sorry] with links to even more discussion. I do not know as to whether or not the case will go to the higher district Court (OLG Frankfurt/Main) for review.

The disputed software components were msdosfs, initrd, and mtd normally used in the context of the Linux kernel.

For a previous case decided by preliminary (summary) proceedings, see

here.

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GNU GPL

[UPDATE 2006-09-24] See also

this article on Groklaw.

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