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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

FYI / "FHNI": The GPL also has issues in Taiwan, apparently because it's illegal there to enforce its constraints on anything but the first user / immediate level. Or something like that — not a lawyer here.

Found this paper on the topic: http://www.law.nagoya-u.ac.jp/ls/review/_userdata/10-04.pdf But honestly I don't understand too much of it.

Either way if France joins Taiwan, that sure isn't a good thing for people relying on the GPL, but it won't break its back either. Some "industry of opportunity" may spring up (it definitely has in Taiwan), but it's not the end of the world.

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You can still pursue GPL violations in France, it just has to be framed as contract violations rather than copyright violations.

Depending on the context you probably still could frame it as a copyright violations.

My guess is that the problems lies in the aspects of the automatic termination of the contract not being valid in France law in exactly that way. I.e. it being "in between" valid and invalid until the court case around the termination is settled and in turn it means there is still a (breached) contract or similar.

If that is the case you might be able to avoid this problem by making sure the contract is properly and explicitly terminated before you start suing, but it also requires the offender to continue using your software after you explicitly terminated the contract. I.e. you couldn't do it in retrospective, and it probably also would be a problem if there is a ongoing curt case for damages due to the breach of contract...

Um, no. The enforceability about third parties discussed in this paper is about following situation:

1. A released the work under CC 2. A then transfer his economic rights of the work to B 3. then C used the CC licensed work in 1.

Under Taiwan's law, if we treat CC as traditional license then C has the right to use the work due to 1., but if we treat CC as contract then C can not invoke CC in 1. to claim usage rights from B. The author then proceed to argue that in the contract case, base on (1) If the type of use is unspecified, we should consider original intention (2) Principle of abuse of rights. Either B can only seek compensation from A by (1) or the transfer is invalid by (2).

> The GPL also has issues in Taiwan, apparently because it's illegal there to enforce its constraints on anything but the first user / immediate level.

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If the enforcement body is corrupt, no licence will stand.

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