Allwinner: "We Are Taking Initiative Actions Internally"

[Staffan]

It should be obvious by now that they have no intention of honoring the license. Normally you would drag them to court by now but the Chinese court system just doesn't care about copyright so you'd likely not get anything out of that

[nils_]

I don't know how law suits work in the us and maybe its a differnt thing in this case, but when I tried to sue our german social department I think one year after it I got a date on the court. And we have then different layers first you win or loose on the lowest court then the loser often can take it one level higher till you reach the highest level ant the sentence is guilty.

The suit was filed in German civil court actually. You can get an injunction/TRO (Einstweilige Verf?gung) fairly quickly but it takes time to get it to main trial. And as you said there's always appeals - the difference in the US is that once you've been acquitted in criminal court the state may not appeal (double jeopardy).

[TheBlackCat]

The lawsuit would need to be filed in china and be processed according to chinese copyright law - which is very different from ours.

No, it is actually pretty similar. The basic copyright rules are set by international treaties, they don't vary a huge amount between countries. The problem isn't the law, the problem is enforcement of the law. Although they are trying to improve the situation, it is still extremely difficult to enforce copyright in China.

[yoshi314]

I am serious, though. Why have a license that no one is going to enforce? It literally makes it worthless.

china and some s.korean companies have a long running history of gpl violations. you should look at media centers based on realtek rtd SoC's for instance. the toolchain includes linux kernel, and only oem's have access to it. and when customers get it, it's half source code and half precompiled modules.

i don't think the effort to resolve this issue went anywhere on gpl-violations mailing list.

[BradN]

it would not work, hardware without the software? No. Probably in their closed sources there is also stolen intellectual property, stolen will be even though taken from open source(GPL) because somewhere in GPL it's said that if you took anything that was under GPL you have to share further, keep on sharing and publish, make source available to everybody.

Well, I was half joking, but it does kinda illustrate their legal options at this point...

[blackiwid]

How is Hellwig's lawsuit against VMWare's GPL violations going? Any news on that?

I don't know how law suits work in the us and maybe its a differnt thing in this case, but when I tried to sue our german social department I think one year after it I got a date on the court. And we have then different layers first you win or loose on the lowest court then the loser often can take it one level higher till you reach the highest level ant the sentence is guilty.

[Temar]

How is Hellwig's lawsuit against VMWare's GPL violations going? Any news on that?

[lejeczek]

All they have to do is stop shipping code with devices and they're legal again. Hell, they could ship the devices just with the required patches against open source components and it's both legal and (technically) usable!

it would not work, hardware without the software? No. Probably in their closed sources there is also stolen intellectual property, stolen will be even though taken from open source(GPL) because somewhere in GPL it's said that if you took anything that was under GPL you have to share further, keep on sharing and publish, make source available to everybody.

[BradN]

All they have to do is stop shipping code with devices and they're legal again. Hell, they could ship the devices just with the required patches against open source components and it's both legal and (technically) usable!

[lejeczek]

Because non-chinese copyright holders suing a chinese company is not a trivial thing to do. The lawsuit would need to be filed in china and be processed according to chinese copyright law - which is very different from ours.
Best they could do is try to ban the import of allwinner products in europe/america, but I'm not sure if allwinner is strong enough in these markets to care.

not necessarily, don't we hear constant never ending scuffles between Apple, Samsung, Google, etc.. and judges banning some certain products on certain markets. The same should be done here, European community should be first to try this as software patents are more realistic in Europe, German court would be best place.
I just don't understand why all the law practitioners, and there is surely many of them involved in free-open software licensing, don't really take any initiative?