Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...

[David Nusinow <david_nusinow@verizon.net>]

On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 08:44:39PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:44:56PM -0500, John Hasler wrote:
> > Henning Makholm writes:
> > > A bicycle trip to my local courthouse: DKK 2, including write-offs on the
> > > bicycle. A trip to some court in America: Tens of thousands of DKKs.
> > 
> > If I were to sue you for infringing the copyright on my GPL software I
> > would file in US district court.
> 
> Assuming it's a nuisance lawsuit, I would ignore it (or file a written
> statement to this effect), and let the judgement lapse (assuming the
> court itself didn't just acknowledge my point and throw it out), since
> I have no intention to enter US territory at any point. When you filed
> in a UK court to attempt to enforce the US judgement, I would raise
> the defence that the claim was nonsense.

This is sort of like saying "I block you with my force field!" Saying the
claim is nonsense if John has good evidence that you are infringing on his
copyright isn't going to get you far.

> If you bring choice-of-venue into the picture, it becomes rather more
> murky.

How so? The only thing I see is that it strengthens the plaintiff's
argument to actually have the case tried in a US court. I doubt this would
be a very weak argument to begin with though.

 - David Nusinow