

GPL scores historic court compliance victory - sedachv
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/04/gpl_violation_westinghouse/

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tzs
Bad reporting from The Register. There's nothing historical, or even all that
interesting, about it as it was a default judgement because the defendant did
not even show up.

After plaintiff sued, defendant filed an answer and made initial disclosures.
Defendant that stopped responding to the court, and told plaintiff that they
would not be defending the action. Defendant then failed to appear for a pre-
motion conference. Defendant's law firm them submitted a motion asking to
withdraw from the case.

Plaintiffs asked for and received a default judgement. In a default judgement
that court assumes that the plaintiffs allegations are all true, and rules
accordingly. GPL isn't even really relevant at that point--all that matters is
that plaintiffs allege they own the copyrighted works and that defendant does
not have a valid license to use them.

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houseabsolute
Also, the defendant is going through a form of bankruptcy. Kind of hard to
dedicate a bunch of resources to defense (or compliance) when there are no
resources left at all.

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jacquesm
Which makes this a particularly bad piece from the register, since their
opening lines are

"The Software Freedom Conservancy has secured $90,000 in damages for willful
infringement of GPLv2, plus nearly $50,000 in costs from Westinghouse Digital
Electronics over its illegal distribution of the Unix utility BusyBox. The
company has also been ordered to stop shipping product loaded with BusyBox."

When it's just about 100% sure that those awards will never be realised.

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protomyth
"The company's costs could have been lower, but the New-York district court
hearing the case took a dim view of the fact that Westinghouse's legal team
failed to appear for the discovery phase. .... Westinghouse is currently in
General Assignment, an alternative to bankruptcy under California state law,
and declined to defend itself."

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fghujkljhg
The reason they didn't show up is that they are bankrupt - so it doesn't
matter how much the court ups the fine, they aren't paying it anyway.

The lawyers aren't about to work for a client that isn't going to pay them

