Ghostscript Commercial License Price
2021年11月16日Download here: http://gg.gg/wwor3
Licensing Ghostscript in a commercial product. We are studying a prospect of using Ghostscript in a commercial product (Windows desktop application). I read about sidestepping licensing GS altogether by simply suggesting to the users that they can download and install GS on their own to improve their experience (the software actually works. Aladdin Free Public License. Not to be confused with the AGPL ( GNU Affero General Public License) used for later versions of Ghostscript. The Aladdin Free Public License, abbreviated AFPL, is a license written by L. Peter Deutsch for his Ghostscript PostScript language interpreter.
You do not need a commercial license from Artifex. GPL Ghostscript is a software package that bundles interpreters for PostScript languages and PDF files, as well as a collection of C procedures for implementing filtering and graphics. Enterprise license. With Premium Support. Ultimate License. With Ultimate Support. The bundled price for dhtmlxSuite is much lower than the total cost of buying components individually. By purchasing the whole dhtmlxSuite library, you get a discount up to 40%. Note that some of the components can be purchased only as part of Suite. So no, you have not obtain ‘commercial license’ from Artifex to use Ghostscript in your app. But if are not going to provide these four freedoms to your users, then yes, you’d better contact Artifex and ask them a price. By the way, Artifex is not pioneer of that practice of copyleft/proprietary bi-licensing, it is well-known for years.IrfanView Software License Agreement.
This is a legal agreement between you and IrfanView Software (Irfan Skiljan) covering your use of IrfanView (the ’Software’).
*IrfanView is provided as freeware, but only for private, non-commercial use (that means at home). Companies and most state organisations need user/device licenses. 1a) IrfanView is free for educational use (schools, universities, museums, libraries) and for use in charity or humanitarian organisations (also in: fire departments or national park services). 1b) If you intend to use IrfanView at your place of business or for commercial purposes, please register and purchase it. Commercial users: please contact me by E-Mail for prices, discounts and payment methods. 1c) If you buy IrfanView user/device license(s), IrfanView hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to use the Software solely for your internal business purposes.
*IrfanView Software is owned by Irfan Skiljan and is protected by copyright laws and international treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat the Software like any other copyrighted material.
*You may not distribute, rent, sub-license or otherwise make available to others the Software or documentation or copies thereof, except as expressly permitted in this License without prior written consent from IrfanView (Irfan Skiljan). In the case of an authorized transfer, the transferee must agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this License Agreement.
*You may not remove any proprietary notices, labels, trademarks on the Software or documentation. You may not modify, de-compile, disassemble or reverse engineer the Software.
*Limited warranty: IrfanView, IrfanView PlugIns and documentation are ’as is’ without any warranty as to their performance, merchant ability or fitness for any particular purpose. The licensee assumes the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the software. In no event shall IrfanView or anyone else who has been involved in the creation, development,production, or delivery of this software be liable for any direct, incidental or consequential damages, such as, but not limited to, loss of anticipated profits, benefits, use, or data resulting from the use of this software, or arising out of any breach of warranty.
Copyright (C) 2021 by Irfan Skiljan, Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Internet: https://www.irfanview.com, https://www.irfanview.net Email: irfanview@gmx.net All rights reserved.Conditions To Distribute Ghostscript In A Commercial Context
Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1983 so that people could use computers using only free software, allowing further modification of programs initially written by others. He established a non-profit organization, the Free Software Foundation, in 1985, to more formally organize the project. Stallman also invented copyleft, a legal mechanism to maintain the free status of a work on modified versions and implemented this through the GNU General Public License (GPL). This license has since been revised twice, known as the GPL Version 2[1] and Version 3.[2] The courts, mainly in the United States, have since grappled with the copyright, contractual and patent issues resulting from questions of legal validity of the GPL and other such off-shooting open source licenses.
This page includes significant open source license litigation to illustrate the courts past and current views on different licences and legal issues. Open source license copyright litigation[edit]Jacobsen v Katzer (2008)[3][edit]
This was a lawsuit in the United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, considering the ability of a copyright holder to control the future distribution and modification of their work where they allow it to be free for public use.
Jacobsen made code available for public download under an open source public license, Artistic License 1.0, which Katzer copied into their own commercial software products without recognition of the source of the code. Jacobsen argued that the terms of the license defined the scope what the code could be used for and that any use outside of these restrictions would be a copyright infringement. The license holder here expressly stated the terms upon which the right to modify and distribute the material depended.
The Court of Appeals established that these license terms are enforceable copyright conditions. Katzer had failed to affix the required copyright notices to the derivative software, which therefore was an infringement of the license. This case established that violations of open source licenses can be treated as copyright claims. BusyBox litigation (2007-13)[edit]
During 2007 to 2009, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed a series of copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf the principal developers of BusyBox. These lawsuits claimed violations of the GNU General Public License Version 2.
In September 2007 they filed a lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia, Inc. alleging that Monsoon had violated the GPL by including BusyBox code in some of their products without releasing the source code. In October 2007, an SFLC press release announced that the lawsuit had been settled with Monsoon agreeing to comply with the GPL and pay a sum of money to the plaintiffs.
In November 2007 they filed a lawsuit against Xterasys Corporation and High-Gain Antennas, LLC. In December 2007, SFLC announced a settlement; Xterasys agreed to stop shipping infringing products until it published the complete source code for the GPL’d code and to pay an undisclosed sum to the plaintiffs. In December 2007 SFLC filed a lawsuit against Verizon Communications, Inc. alleging that Verizon had violated the GPL by distributing BusyBox in wireless routers bundled with the FiOS fiber optic bandwidth service, without providing corresponding source code. A settlement announced In March 2008, included an agreement to comply with the GPL and an undisclosed sum paid to the plaintiffs.
In December 2009, they filed a lawsuit against 14 companies, including Best Buy, Samsung, and Westinghouse with the same allegations of violation of the GPL. By the end of September 2013, all of the defendant companies had agreed on settlement terms, except for Westinghouse, against whom default judgment was entered.Free Software Foundation, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc (2009)[edit]
This was a lawsuit initiated by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) against Cisco Systems on December 11, 2008 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The FSF claimed that various products sold by Cisco under the Linksys brand had violated the licensing terms of many programs on which FSF held copyright, including GCC, GNU Binutils, and the GNU C Library. Most of these programs were licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2, and a few under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
The Software Freedom Law Center acted as the FSF’s lawyers in the case, asking the court to enjoin Cisco from further distributing Linksys firmware that contained FSF copyrighted code, and also asked for damages amounting from all profits that Cisco received ’from its unlawful acts.’ The FSF contended that code to which it held the copyright was found in multiple Linksys models, and in the program QuickVPN.
On May 20, 2009 the parties announced a settlement that included Cisco appointing a director to ensure Linksys products comply with free-software licenses, and Cisco making an undisclosed financial contribution to the FSF.Open source license as a contract litigation[edit]Artifex Software Inc v Hancom Inc (2017)[4][edit]
Leading on from Jacobsen v Katzer this case, from the United States District Court, N.D. California, focused on the breaches of open source software licenses, but extended to contract breaches as well as copyright infringements. Artifex is the exclusive licensor of the software product, ‘Ghostscript’, under the GNU General Public License Version 3. Hancom is a South Korean software company that used Ghostscript in software they were selling.
This case concerned Hancom’s failure to distribute or offer to provide the source code for their software. The GNU GPL provides that the Ghostscript user agrees to its terms, thus creating a contract, if the user does not obtain a commercial license. Artifex alleged that Hancom did not obtain a commercial license to use Ghostscript, and represented publicly that its use of Ghostscript was licensed under the GNU GPL. These allegations sufficiently plead the existence of a contract.
This case establishes that the GNU GPL constitutes a contract between the owner of the source code and the person/company that uses that code through the license. This sets the precedent that allows licensors to bring claims of breach of contract where the terms of a license are not complied with.SCO Group Inc v International Business Machines Corporation (2017)[5][edit]
This was a case decided through the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. It covered a complex contractual matrix with claims made in tort across the contractual duties. In the end it created a stir in the open source community as the claims of ownership over code were disputed. Eben Moglen, the counsel for the Free Software Foundation, released a statement regarding the lawsuit:
As to its trade secret claims, which are the only claims actually made in the lawsuit against IBM, there remains the simple fact that SCO has for years distributed copies of the kernel, Linux, as part of GNU/Linux free software systems. [...] There is simply no legal basis on which SCO can claim trade secret liability in others for material it widely and commercially published itself under [the GNU GPL Version 2] that specifically permitted unrestricted copying and distribution.
The SCO Group announced on May 14, 2003, that they would no longer distribute Linux. SCO said that it would ’continue to support existing SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux customers and hold them harmless from any SCO intellectual property issues regarding SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux products’.
SCO claimed and maintains that any code that was GPL’d was done by employees without proper authorisation, and thus the license doesn’t stand legally. This is supported by the fact that for code to be GPL’d, the copyright owner must put a GPL notice before the code, and SCO itself was not the one to add the notices.Software patenting litigation[edit]Diamond v Diehr (1981),[6] Bilski v Kappos (2010),[7] and Alice Corporation Pty Ltd v CLS Bank International (2014)[8][edit]
These cases decided in the Supreme Court of United States set out the law around what makes an invention patent eligible in reference to computer programs. It was stated that to transform an abstract idea into a patent eligible process requires more than simply stating the idea followed by the words, “apply it”; accordingly simply implementing a program on a computer is not a patentable application. This is because if you take away the computer then all that is left is the abstract idea, which is not a process or another accepted creation, and is therefore not patentable. The only place a patent eligible process is qualified by its implementation by a computer is where it improves an existing technological process. So computer programs cannot be patented, but can be copyrighted.
The Software Freedom Law Center submitted a brief to the United States Court of Appeals in the Federal Circuit for Alice Corporation v CLS Bank to support the long-standing court precedents limiting patent rights for computer programs.[9] The open source community has an interest in limiting the reach of patent law so that free software development is not impeded upon. The SFLC showed its support for the “machine or transformation” test which only allows patents for computer software processes which include a special purpose apparatus not merely a general purpose computer to execute the program. The Court’s decision reflected the ideas set out in the SFLC submission. Enfish LLC v Microsoft Corp (2016)[10][edit]
Is an example of a case where a software patent’s eligibility was questioned, and it came out on top. Enfish proved that their program was sufficiently improving the technology. This United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit case highlighted that an invention’s ability to run on a general-purpose computer does not preclude it from being patent eligible. This could be seen as a threat by the open source community. Antitrust litigation[edit]Wallace v. International Business Machines Corp (2006)[11][edit]
This case was decided, at the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, that in United States law the GNU GPL Version 2 did not contravene federal antitrust laws. This suit came after the dismissed action, Wallace v Free Software Foundation (2006),[12] where the Foundation and the GPL Version 2 specifically came under fire for price fixing. Wallace’s argument was that the ‘copyleft’ system created by the Free Software Foundation is a project with IBM, Novell and Red Hat to undercut the prices of potential rivals. It was argued that this could be governed under antitrust law which regulates predatory pricing. The effect would be to shut down a process where a company or companies undercut the competition to gain a monopoly, and then exploit it by raising the prices.
The purpose of the law is to protect consumers from this process, to promote rivalry to keep prices low. However, Mr Wallace was attempting to use anti-trust law to drive prices up, suggesting that it was impossible to compete with their prices. Wallace had to prove not only an injury to himself but to the market as well under antitrust law, which he failed to do.
The claim was quickly dismissed as the number of proprietary operating systems was growing, and there continues to be competition in the market despite some being free of charge. So it was confirmed that the GPL and open source software cannot be challenged by antitrust laws. Open source software fair use litigation[edit]Oracle America Inc v. Google Inc (2018)[13][edit]
This was a case finally decided in the United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018, which concerned the fair use by Google of the source code licensed by Oracle under the GNU GPL Version 2. Google had copied 37 Application Programming Interface packages (APIs) to aid in the building of its free Android software for smartphones. Google had taken these APIs and then written its own implementing code and launched a product which competed with Oracle’s.
The conditions of the license were that the improvements of the code, or derivative code, had to be shared for free use. If somebody wanted to avoid this, but still use the APIs, or where they would be competing with the owners of the code, then they would need to pay a licensing fee. Google used the APIs without paying a licensing fee, but competed with Oracle’s product, which Oracle contended was a breach of copyright.
The Court of Appeals decided in favour of Oracle, after considering what would make a fair use of the code, with Google failing on a majority of accounts. As of November 15 2019 the United States Supreme Court has decided to allow appeal to its court on the same question, which now holds $9 billion in damages above Google if they fail again.[14]Ghostscript Commercial License Price List
In April 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–2 decision that Google’s use of the Java APIs fell within the four factors of fair use, bypassing the question on whether APIs can be copyrighted. The decision reversed the Federal Circuit ruling and remanded the case for further review.Open source software trade secrets litigation[edit]
A Korean case(2005)[15] from the Seoul Central District Court in September, 2005 considered the issue of defendants conducting business for a rival company using source code from a program developed by the company they had previously worked, licensed under a GNU GPL Version 2. Trade secrets are sufficient if their contents are of competitive property value and, unlike patents, are not required to be novel or progressive. The purpose of prohibiting trade secret infringement is to avoid unfair advantage, stopping companies from obtaining a favourable head-start over competitors placing them in a superior position.
One defendant retired from their company and kept a copy of the source code privately, providing it to the rival company, shortening the development period by two months. The Court ruled that the GPL was not material to the case. The Defendants argued that it is impossible to maintain trade secrets while being compliant with GPL and distributing the work, so they could not be in breach of trade secrets. This argument was considered without ground and the defendants were sentenced following criminal proceedings.Other/international open source license litigation[edit]Planetary Motion v. Techsplosion (2001)[16][edit]
United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit case, “Software distributed pursuant to [the GPL] is not necessarily ceded to the public domain” (dicta).Computer Associates v. Quest (2004)[17][edit]
This case decided in the United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division considered the fact that Computer Associate’s source code contains previously known source code (GNU Bison Version 1.25), available under the GPL, does not prevent them from protecting their own
https://diarynote-jp.indered.space
Licensing Ghostscript in a commercial product. We are studying a prospect of using Ghostscript in a commercial product (Windows desktop application). I read about sidestepping licensing GS altogether by simply suggesting to the users that they can download and install GS on their own to improve their experience (the software actually works. Aladdin Free Public License. Not to be confused with the AGPL ( GNU Affero General Public License) used for later versions of Ghostscript. The Aladdin Free Public License, abbreviated AFPL, is a license written by L. Peter Deutsch for his Ghostscript PostScript language interpreter.
You do not need a commercial license from Artifex. GPL Ghostscript is a software package that bundles interpreters for PostScript languages and PDF files, as well as a collection of C procedures for implementing filtering and graphics. Enterprise license. With Premium Support. Ultimate License. With Ultimate Support. The bundled price for dhtmlxSuite is much lower than the total cost of buying components individually. By purchasing the whole dhtmlxSuite library, you get a discount up to 40%. Note that some of the components can be purchased only as part of Suite. So no, you have not obtain ‘commercial license’ from Artifex to use Ghostscript in your app. But if are not going to provide these four freedoms to your users, then yes, you’d better contact Artifex and ask them a price. By the way, Artifex is not pioneer of that practice of copyleft/proprietary bi-licensing, it is well-known for years.IrfanView Software License Agreement.
This is a legal agreement between you and IrfanView Software (Irfan Skiljan) covering your use of IrfanView (the ’Software’).
*IrfanView is provided as freeware, but only for private, non-commercial use (that means at home). Companies and most state organisations need user/device licenses. 1a) IrfanView is free for educational use (schools, universities, museums, libraries) and for use in charity or humanitarian organisations (also in: fire departments or national park services). 1b) If you intend to use IrfanView at your place of business or for commercial purposes, please register and purchase it. Commercial users: please contact me by E-Mail for prices, discounts and payment methods. 1c) If you buy IrfanView user/device license(s), IrfanView hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to use the Software solely for your internal business purposes.
*IrfanView Software is owned by Irfan Skiljan and is protected by copyright laws and international treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat the Software like any other copyrighted material.
*You may not distribute, rent, sub-license or otherwise make available to others the Software or documentation or copies thereof, except as expressly permitted in this License without prior written consent from IrfanView (Irfan Skiljan). In the case of an authorized transfer, the transferee must agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this License Agreement.
*You may not remove any proprietary notices, labels, trademarks on the Software or documentation. You may not modify, de-compile, disassemble or reverse engineer the Software.
*Limited warranty: IrfanView, IrfanView PlugIns and documentation are ’as is’ without any warranty as to their performance, merchant ability or fitness for any particular purpose. The licensee assumes the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the software. In no event shall IrfanView or anyone else who has been involved in the creation, development,production, or delivery of this software be liable for any direct, incidental or consequential damages, such as, but not limited to, loss of anticipated profits, benefits, use, or data resulting from the use of this software, or arising out of any breach of warranty.
Copyright (C) 2021 by Irfan Skiljan, Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Internet: https://www.irfanview.com, https://www.irfanview.net Email: irfanview@gmx.net All rights reserved.Conditions To Distribute Ghostscript In A Commercial Context
Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1983 so that people could use computers using only free software, allowing further modification of programs initially written by others. He established a non-profit organization, the Free Software Foundation, in 1985, to more formally organize the project. Stallman also invented copyleft, a legal mechanism to maintain the free status of a work on modified versions and implemented this through the GNU General Public License (GPL). This license has since been revised twice, known as the GPL Version 2[1] and Version 3.[2] The courts, mainly in the United States, have since grappled with the copyright, contractual and patent issues resulting from questions of legal validity of the GPL and other such off-shooting open source licenses.
This page includes significant open source license litigation to illustrate the courts past and current views on different licences and legal issues. Open source license copyright litigation[edit]Jacobsen v Katzer (2008)[3][edit]
This was a lawsuit in the United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, considering the ability of a copyright holder to control the future distribution and modification of their work where they allow it to be free for public use.
Jacobsen made code available for public download under an open source public license, Artistic License 1.0, which Katzer copied into their own commercial software products without recognition of the source of the code. Jacobsen argued that the terms of the license defined the scope what the code could be used for and that any use outside of these restrictions would be a copyright infringement. The license holder here expressly stated the terms upon which the right to modify and distribute the material depended.
The Court of Appeals established that these license terms are enforceable copyright conditions. Katzer had failed to affix the required copyright notices to the derivative software, which therefore was an infringement of the license. This case established that violations of open source licenses can be treated as copyright claims. BusyBox litigation (2007-13)[edit]
During 2007 to 2009, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed a series of copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf the principal developers of BusyBox. These lawsuits claimed violations of the GNU General Public License Version 2.
In September 2007 they filed a lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia, Inc. alleging that Monsoon had violated the GPL by including BusyBox code in some of their products without releasing the source code. In October 2007, an SFLC press release announced that the lawsuit had been settled with Monsoon agreeing to comply with the GPL and pay a sum of money to the plaintiffs.
In November 2007 they filed a lawsuit against Xterasys Corporation and High-Gain Antennas, LLC. In December 2007, SFLC announced a settlement; Xterasys agreed to stop shipping infringing products until it published the complete source code for the GPL’d code and to pay an undisclosed sum to the plaintiffs. In December 2007 SFLC filed a lawsuit against Verizon Communications, Inc. alleging that Verizon had violated the GPL by distributing BusyBox in wireless routers bundled with the FiOS fiber optic bandwidth service, without providing corresponding source code. A settlement announced In March 2008, included an agreement to comply with the GPL and an undisclosed sum paid to the plaintiffs.
In December 2009, they filed a lawsuit against 14 companies, including Best Buy, Samsung, and Westinghouse with the same allegations of violation of the GPL. By the end of September 2013, all of the defendant companies had agreed on settlement terms, except for Westinghouse, against whom default judgment was entered.Free Software Foundation, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc (2009)[edit]
This was a lawsuit initiated by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) against Cisco Systems on December 11, 2008 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The FSF claimed that various products sold by Cisco under the Linksys brand had violated the licensing terms of many programs on which FSF held copyright, including GCC, GNU Binutils, and the GNU C Library. Most of these programs were licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2, and a few under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
The Software Freedom Law Center acted as the FSF’s lawyers in the case, asking the court to enjoin Cisco from further distributing Linksys firmware that contained FSF copyrighted code, and also asked for damages amounting from all profits that Cisco received ’from its unlawful acts.’ The FSF contended that code to which it held the copyright was found in multiple Linksys models, and in the program QuickVPN.
On May 20, 2009 the parties announced a settlement that included Cisco appointing a director to ensure Linksys products comply with free-software licenses, and Cisco making an undisclosed financial contribution to the FSF.Open source license as a contract litigation[edit]Artifex Software Inc v Hancom Inc (2017)[4][edit]
Leading on from Jacobsen v Katzer this case, from the United States District Court, N.D. California, focused on the breaches of open source software licenses, but extended to contract breaches as well as copyright infringements. Artifex is the exclusive licensor of the software product, ‘Ghostscript’, under the GNU General Public License Version 3. Hancom is a South Korean software company that used Ghostscript in software they were selling.
This case concerned Hancom’s failure to distribute or offer to provide the source code for their software. The GNU GPL provides that the Ghostscript user agrees to its terms, thus creating a contract, if the user does not obtain a commercial license. Artifex alleged that Hancom did not obtain a commercial license to use Ghostscript, and represented publicly that its use of Ghostscript was licensed under the GNU GPL. These allegations sufficiently plead the existence of a contract.
This case establishes that the GNU GPL constitutes a contract between the owner of the source code and the person/company that uses that code through the license. This sets the precedent that allows licensors to bring claims of breach of contract where the terms of a license are not complied with.SCO Group Inc v International Business Machines Corporation (2017)[5][edit]
This was a case decided through the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. It covered a complex contractual matrix with claims made in tort across the contractual duties. In the end it created a stir in the open source community as the claims of ownership over code were disputed. Eben Moglen, the counsel for the Free Software Foundation, released a statement regarding the lawsuit:
As to its trade secret claims, which are the only claims actually made in the lawsuit against IBM, there remains the simple fact that SCO has for years distributed copies of the kernel, Linux, as part of GNU/Linux free software systems. [...] There is simply no legal basis on which SCO can claim trade secret liability in others for material it widely and commercially published itself under [the GNU GPL Version 2] that specifically permitted unrestricted copying and distribution.
The SCO Group announced on May 14, 2003, that they would no longer distribute Linux. SCO said that it would ’continue to support existing SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux customers and hold them harmless from any SCO intellectual property issues regarding SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux products’.
SCO claimed and maintains that any code that was GPL’d was done by employees without proper authorisation, and thus the license doesn’t stand legally. This is supported by the fact that for code to be GPL’d, the copyright owner must put a GPL notice before the code, and SCO itself was not the one to add the notices.Software patenting litigation[edit]Diamond v Diehr (1981),[6] Bilski v Kappos (2010),[7] and Alice Corporation Pty Ltd v CLS Bank International (2014)[8][edit]
These cases decided in the Supreme Court of United States set out the law around what makes an invention patent eligible in reference to computer programs. It was stated that to transform an abstract idea into a patent eligible process requires more than simply stating the idea followed by the words, “apply it”; accordingly simply implementing a program on a computer is not a patentable application. This is because if you take away the computer then all that is left is the abstract idea, which is not a process or another accepted creation, and is therefore not patentable. The only place a patent eligible process is qualified by its implementation by a computer is where it improves an existing technological process. So computer programs cannot be patented, but can be copyrighted.
The Software Freedom Law Center submitted a brief to the United States Court of Appeals in the Federal Circuit for Alice Corporation v CLS Bank to support the long-standing court precedents limiting patent rights for computer programs.[9] The open source community has an interest in limiting the reach of patent law so that free software development is not impeded upon. The SFLC showed its support for the “machine or transformation” test which only allows patents for computer software processes which include a special purpose apparatus not merely a general purpose computer to execute the program. The Court’s decision reflected the ideas set out in the SFLC submission. Enfish LLC v Microsoft Corp (2016)[10][edit]
Is an example of a case where a software patent’s eligibility was questioned, and it came out on top. Enfish proved that their program was sufficiently improving the technology. This United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit case highlighted that an invention’s ability to run on a general-purpose computer does not preclude it from being patent eligible. This could be seen as a threat by the open source community. Antitrust litigation[edit]Wallace v. International Business Machines Corp (2006)[11][edit]
This case was decided, at the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, that in United States law the GNU GPL Version 2 did not contravene federal antitrust laws. This suit came after the dismissed action, Wallace v Free Software Foundation (2006),[12] where the Foundation and the GPL Version 2 specifically came under fire for price fixing. Wallace’s argument was that the ‘copyleft’ system created by the Free Software Foundation is a project with IBM, Novell and Red Hat to undercut the prices of potential rivals. It was argued that this could be governed under antitrust law which regulates predatory pricing. The effect would be to shut down a process where a company or companies undercut the competition to gain a monopoly, and then exploit it by raising the prices.
The purpose of the law is to protect consumers from this process, to promote rivalry to keep prices low. However, Mr Wallace was attempting to use anti-trust law to drive prices up, suggesting that it was impossible to compete with their prices. Wallace had to prove not only an injury to himself but to the market as well under antitrust law, which he failed to do.
The claim was quickly dismissed as the number of proprietary operating systems was growing, and there continues to be competition in the market despite some being free of charge. So it was confirmed that the GPL and open source software cannot be challenged by antitrust laws. Open source software fair use litigation[edit]Oracle America Inc v. Google Inc (2018)[13][edit]
This was a case finally decided in the United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018, which concerned the fair use by Google of the source code licensed by Oracle under the GNU GPL Version 2. Google had copied 37 Application Programming Interface packages (APIs) to aid in the building of its free Android software for smartphones. Google had taken these APIs and then written its own implementing code and launched a product which competed with Oracle’s.
The conditions of the license were that the improvements of the code, or derivative code, had to be shared for free use. If somebody wanted to avoid this, but still use the APIs, or where they would be competing with the owners of the code, then they would need to pay a licensing fee. Google used the APIs without paying a licensing fee, but competed with Oracle’s product, which Oracle contended was a breach of copyright.
The Court of Appeals decided in favour of Oracle, after considering what would make a fair use of the code, with Google failing on a majority of accounts. As of November 15 2019 the United States Supreme Court has decided to allow appeal to its court on the same question, which now holds $9 billion in damages above Google if they fail again.[14]Ghostscript Commercial License Price List
In April 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–2 decision that Google’s use of the Java APIs fell within the four factors of fair use, bypassing the question on whether APIs can be copyrighted. The decision reversed the Federal Circuit ruling and remanded the case for further review.Open source software trade secrets litigation[edit]
A Korean case(2005)[15] from the Seoul Central District Court in September, 2005 considered the issue of defendants conducting business for a rival company using source code from a program developed by the company they had previously worked, licensed under a GNU GPL Version 2. Trade secrets are sufficient if their contents are of competitive property value and, unlike patents, are not required to be novel or progressive. The purpose of prohibiting trade secret infringement is to avoid unfair advantage, stopping companies from obtaining a favourable head-start over competitors placing them in a superior position.
One defendant retired from their company and kept a copy of the source code privately, providing it to the rival company, shortening the development period by two months. The Court ruled that the GPL was not material to the case. The Defendants argued that it is impossible to maintain trade secrets while being compliant with GPL and distributing the work, so they could not be in breach of trade secrets. This argument was considered without ground and the defendants were sentenced following criminal proceedings.Other/international open source license litigation[edit]Planetary Motion v. Techsplosion (2001)[16][edit]
United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit case, “Software distributed pursuant to [the GPL] is not necessarily ceded to the public domain” (dicta).Computer Associates v. Quest (2004)[17][edit]
This case decided in the United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division considered the fact that Computer Associate’s source code contains previously known source code (GNU Bison Version 1.25), available under the GPL, does not prevent them from protecting their own
https://diarynote-jp.indered.space
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