Re: your mail
On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 10:31:02PM -0800, D. Starner wrote:
> > Also, in any sane legal
> > system, it should only affect those users who willingly violate the licence,
> > even after a cease-and-desist letter, and i would say they deserve what they
> > get.
>
> In any sane legal system, the judge is going to find out what's going
> on from both sides before he even considers dismissing the case. That
Ok, but we are in the case where the defendor is innocent, right ?
> means that the user has to hire a French lawyer to write a response to
> the statement of cause. Unless the judges are omniscient, that's what
> has to happen.
What exactly is stopping him from hiring a local lawyer to write the statement
and sent it per letter to the judge, and how will it differ from the case
where the court of venue is local to him ? The choice of law is the french law
in both case.
> And let's be honest; a court case may look obvious to us, but few
> judges have ever had a case where an open-sourceish license is
Well, but a tentative to repeteadly harass using lawsuits will probably not be
missed by a judge.
> involved, and not many more are familiar with programming and the
> free software community. The judge may need some time to get up
> to speed.
Well, it may be, but upstream has to frame the accusation, and you get at
least a chance to send a letter defending yourself before it goes in full
motion.
> > In the ocaml case, the upstream authors being a small team of 6-10 people
> > from the academic world, and wanting to be as unbothered as possible in
> > all these issues, also may fear the violation of the ocaml licence by
> > entities such as sun or microsoft, which would gain from the ocaml
> > technology in both java and C#,
>
> I understand they fear the use of OCaml code in any non-functional
> programming system, Free or not. In any case, neither Sun or Microsoft
> is probably going to want to copy code from OCaml; they want to copy
> ideas. And that is not protected by copyright law.
Point taken.
> > fear that a court of venue in the US may render any chance of getting
> > justice void, given the money governed US legal system.
>
> Somehow, I am left unconcerned by the irrational fears of bigots. I'm
Well, is it or is it not so ? In all the software lawsuits i hear about,
including those music-industry against teenage childs, the amount of money
available plays an immediate role in the possibility to defend oneself. If
that is not so, its their own fault they publicize it in that way.
> sure Americans could equally rational worry that a court of venue in
> France may render any chance of getting justice void, giving the fact
> they are Americans.
I doubt the USians leaving in france would feel the same though.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Reply to: