The human rights organization Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) announced a new round of legal proceedings with Vizio, accused of failing to comply with the requirements of the GPL license when distributing firmware for smart TVs based on the SmartCast platform. Representatives of the SFC achieved the return of the case from the US Federal Court to the California District Court, which is of fundamental importance from the point of view of classifying the GPL not only as copyright, but also as a contractual relationship.
Previously, Vizio achieved the transfer of the case to the Federal Court, which is authorized to resolve issues related to copyright infringement. The case under consideration is notable in that for the first time in history it was filed not on behalf of a development participant who owns the property rights to the code, but on the part of a consumer who was not provided with the source texts of the components distributed under the GPL license. By shifting the consideration of the GPL to copyright, Vizio bases its defense on trying to prove that consumers are not the beneficiaries and have no right to file such claims. Those. Vizio is seeking dismissal of the case on the grounds of wrongfulness of the lawsuit, without touching upon the challenge of the allegations of violation of the GPL.
Representatives of the SFC organization start from the fact that the GPL has elements of a contract and the consumer, to whom the license grants certain rights, is its participant and may demand the exercise of his rights to receive the code of the derivative product. The Federal Court's agreement to return the case to the District Court confirms the possibility of applying contract law to GPL infringement (copyright infringement proceedings are in Federal courts, and infringement of contract in district courts).
Judge Josephine Stayton, who heard the case, refused to dismiss the suit on the grounds that the plaintiff was not the beneficiary of copyright infringement proceedings, since the performance of the additional contractual obligation noted in the GPL license is separate from the rights granted by copyright laws. The ruling remanding the case to the district court noted that the GPL operates both as a license to use a copyrighted work and as a contractual agreement.
The lawsuit against Vizio was filed in 2021 after three years of trying to enforce the requirements of the GPL license amicably. GPL packages such as the Linux kernel, U-Boot, Bash, gawk, GNU tar, glibc, FFmpeg, Bluez, BusyBox, Coreutils, glib, dnsmasq, DirectFB, libgcrypt and systemd have been identified in the firmware of Vizio smart TVs, but the company did not provide the possibility of the user requesting the source texts of the GPL-components of the firmware, and in the information materials did not mention the use of software under copyleft licenses and the rights granted by these licenses. The lawsuit does not provide for monetary compensation, the SFC organization only asks the court to oblige Vizio to comply with the terms of the GPL in its products and inform consumers about the rights that copyleft licenses provide.
A manufacturer that uses copyleft-licensed code in its products must provide source code, including code for derivative works and installation instructions, to preserve the freedom of the software. Without such actions, the user loses control over the software, cannot independently fix errors, add new features and remove unnecessary functionality. You may need to make changes to protect your privacy, fix issues that the manufacturer refuses to fix on your own, and extend the life of a device after it has ended official support or has been artificially obsolete to incentivize the purchase of a new model.
Source: opennet.ru