Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/895405/
Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC)
has announced
that it succeeded with its motion in US Federal Court to send the case back
to California, where it was originally filed. The suit was filed
in October 2021 by SFC, as an owner of Vizio televisions, to get
the company to comply with the GPL on some of the code in the TVs. Back in November, Vizio had
asked to move the
case to Federal Court, because the GPL is only a copyright license
(which is a dispute handled at the Federal level) and not a contract (that
could be adjudicated in state court). Friday’s ruling disagreed with that premise:
The May 13 ruling by the Honorable Josephine L. Staton stated that the
claim from Software Freedom Conservancy succeeded in the “extra element
test” and was not preempted by copyright claims, and the court finds “that
the enforcement of ‘an additional contractual promise separate and distinct
from any rights provided by the copyright laws’ amounts to an ‘extra
element,’ and therefore, SFC’s claims are not preempted.”“The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleft
licensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both as
copyright licenses and as contractual agreements,” says Karen M. Sandler,
executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy. Sandler noted that many
in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) legal community argue
incorrectly that the GPL and other copyleft licenses only function as
copyright licenses.