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Comment by sscheper | Hacker News Reader

Is it a crime to put your life into creating something, marketing it extremely well, attracting a ton of avid fans/users, and deciding that he or she doesn't want others undercutting the price?

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If you violate a license as the foundation of that work? Not a crime, but certainly a civil violation of said license. Thesis' author has ignored the terms of the license of the software that he used in the construction of his own software, but ignorance does not merit pardon. Thesis, by inclusion of GPL code, is required to be licensed under the GPL. Failure to do so is unlicensed usage of the code; ie, copyright infringement. Either he is in violation of copyright by using code outside of the license, or he is in violation of the license by not GPLing Thesis itself. Either way, the author is in breach of someone's rights, and Thesis, as a work, may only be legally distributed under a GPL license.

I can't say I blame him for putting up a fight, since it's his bread-and-butter and GPLing it would cut his financial knees out from under him, but it's not even a debate at this point whether or not GPL code is included in Thesis. This is a fight that he can't win.

It is illegal to take someone else's copyrighted code and create derivative works of and redistribute it in ways they have expressly forbidden you to do so in the license which gives you your right to use it.

If by doing so you violate copyright law by using someone else's code in a way disallowed by the license under which you got access to the code in the first place, then yes.

(I'm not well enough versed in this particular debate to weigh in, but there is an answer to that question, in general, and it hinges on specific details of one's implementation of "creating something.")

Is it moral to make money from other people's work against both their wishes and the terms of their license?

Morality, Ethics, Capitalism, License Agreements and the Law... no matter how you may see that they overlap, they're all separate things.

In the end, it's the laws of the land that you're in that matters. As far as I know, I don't believe that these arguments on what is a derivative work are anything more than opinion. Settled cases are not equivalent to legal precedent.

The best thing that could happen for everyone involved is that it goes to trial and ends with a judgement, and then all this posturing and pontificating will hopefully come to a merciful end.

No. Copyright infringement is a crime, however.

Arguably pedantic note: under most jurisdictions, copyright infringement is a non-criminal offense in civil law.

To be equally pedantic but in a more geographically limited fashion: in the US, there are criminal copyright statutes. =)

It is a crime under US federal law, as well the laws of most industrialised countries. However, you are right in a way in that not all copyright infringement is a crime under US law.

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