First testing of GPL in court?

Thursday, April 14th, 2005

In my RSS reader, I just noticed a story about an injunction against Fortinet for GPL violations. (Original press release) The preliminary injunction on holding sales by Fortinet was filed by gpl-violations.org and granted by the Munich district court:

The gpl-violations.org project has uncovered violations by Fortinet UK Ltd., the UK subsidiary of Fortinet Inc., of the GNU General Public License (GPL). According to gpl-violations.org, Fortinet used GPL software in certain products and then used cryptographic techniques to conceal that usage.

As a result of this violation, the Munich district court has granted a preliminary injunction against Fortinet Ltd., banning them from further distribution of their products until they are in compliance with the GNU GPL conditions.

Will this be the first real legal case, as far as I know, involving the GPL? Will it hold up? Perhaps now we’ll finally know.

Update: Now that I think about it, whether the GPL ‘works’ is really a non-issue. All that matters is if you can prove that someone violated the rights granted by the GPL. If you can do that, they automatically loose those rights and the software is placed back under the normal Copyright, meaning that they lose all rights to modify and redistribute the software. So, the GPL really doesn’t need to be tested in court.