The US Court of Appeals upheld the district court's earlier decision in a case against PureThink related to Neo4j Inc.'s intellectual property infringement. The lawsuit concerns violation of the Neo4j trademark and the use of false statements in advertising during the distribution of the Neo4j DBMS fork.
Initially, the Neo4j DBMS developed as an open project, supplied under the AGPLv3 license. Over time, the product was divided into a free Community edition and a commercial version, Neo4 EE, which continued to be distributed under the AGPL license. Several releases ago, Neo4j Inc changed the terms of delivery and made changes to the AGPL text for the Neo4 EE product, establishing additional “Commons Clause” conditions that limit the use in cloud services. The addition of the Commons Clause reclassified the product as proprietary software.
The text of the AGPLv3 license contains a clause prohibiting the imposition of additional restrictions that infringe the rights granted by the license, and if additional restrictions are added to the license text, it allows the use of the software under the original license by removing the added restrictions. PureThink took advantage of this feature and, based on the Neo4 EE product code translated to a modified AGPL license, began developing a fork of ONgDB (Open Native Graph Database), delivered under a pure AGPLv3 license and positioned as a free and completely open version of Neo4 EE.
The court sided with the Neo4j developers and found PureThink’s actions unacceptable and the statements about the completely open nature of their product false. The court decision made two statements that deserve attention:
- Despite the presence in the text of the AGPL of a clause allowing the removal of additional restrictions, the court prohibited the defendant from carrying out such manipulations.
- The court referred to the expression “open source” not as a general term, but as subject to a certain type of license that meets the criteria defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). For example, using the phrase “100% open source” for products under a pure AGPLv3 license may not be considered false advertising, but using the same phrase for a product under a modified AGPLv3 license would constitute unlawful false advertising.
Source: opennet.ru
