Erik Anderson and Rob Laney, authors of a UNIX program called BusyBox, recently filed one of the first lawsuits in the United States based on violations of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (“GPL”). In Andersen et al. v. Monsoon Multimedia Inc., filed in the Southern District of New York, the authors claimed that a company called Monsoon infringed their copyright because Monsoon incorporated the BusyBox software into its HAVA TV product without properly making the final software product freely available to its customers.
Anderson and Laney distributed BusyBox under the GPL, a type of Copyleft license. Copyleft is a use rights system allowing free use of a creation as long as the resulting work is similarly published with free use rights. Anderson and Laney Claimed that by using BusyBox, Monsoon was required to distribute its derivative work (HAVA TV), or at least the portion of HAVA TV incorporating BusyBox, under a similar Copyleft license. The plaintiffs in the case are seeking copyright damages – money damages, disgorgement, an injunction, and attorney’s fees.
If you or your client is incorporating software licensed under the GPL into products that will be redistributed, it is important to review the GPL and understand the obligations regarding redistribution of the software.
Read about Copyleft here.