Some time ago, the FSFE published a call for Street Art Artists hoping to get some catchy art work on the theme of Open Standards. Today, I have found hilarious example of such art.
Tell me what do you think of it? Are we going to use something like that? Any similar thoughts?
Other examples
Free Software Foundation Europe calls for an amendment of the Slovak Copyright Act that would eventually enable Free Software and Creative Commons licenses for Slovak citizens. Currently, these licenses are considered to be void due to lack of their written form and problems with formation of the contract. Slovakia is thus one of a few countries where these popular licensing tools still struggle with rigid legislative framework. During the last week, FSFE therefore sent support letters to four members of Slovak Parliament that proposed this highly awaited amendment, but later faced its dismissal due to preliminary elections (See the sample letter below). If you also feel that also other 5 million Europeans should have this option, please support our action and write members of Slovak parliament (regardless of your residence). Explain them what is your experience with Free Software or just reuse our letter. Your support is important!.
I just finished one well-written article by Till Jaeger named Enforcement of the GNU GPL in Germany and Europe. It is available for free on JIPITEC. What have drawn my attention is this paragraph.
Even companies that distribute GPL products without holding copyrights may soon begin to enforce the GPL by relying on unfair competition law (instead of copyright law) in order to obtain the complete corre-sponding source codes of improved software solutions from their competitors.
It refers by means of the footnote to following literature.
See G. Spindler, Rechtsfragen bei open source, p. 128 and T. Jaeger/A. Metzger, Open Source Software, 2. ed, para. 336 et seq
Interesting thing to test in the court I would say. Last week I blogged on another intersection of unfair competition and GPL licensing (in Slovak) in regard to AVM v. Cybit case.
AVM Computersysteme Vertiebs GmbH” (AVM) v. “Cybits AG” looks like very interesting case. Plaintiff, the AVM, is using unfair competition law and trade mark law to enforce the copyright rights it has “lost” due to GPL licensing. Background of the case is here.
FSFE reports that AVM claims following:
The focus of the hearing, however, lay less on the area of Copyright but more on trademark and competition law issues. AVM doesn’t deny that the GNU GPL licensed software installed on the routers may be changed by the users, but maintains the opinion that no altered software may then be reinstalled on the routers. AVM relied on two main arguments:
AVM routers with the software changed by Cybits’ software might possibly reach third parties who would have no knowledge of the firmware changes and who may therefore attribute possible router functional changes to AVM even if they were actually caused by the software of Cybits. Therefore, the trademark rights of AVM were infringed. This also constituted an act of unfair competition.
To me, I can´t see any trade mark use by Cybits. Even if that would be the case, it should be reminded that protection beyond confusion is only present in case of reputed trade marks (art. 5(2) of TM directive). Also, if the contract allows you to do something, enforcing the very same on the basis of unfair competition law seems to be quite non-sense. But one never, know .. let´s see what the Distric Court of Berlin thinks of this.