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Comment by gunapologist99 | Hacker News Reader

Please cite an example. Most countries' copyright law tips civil license agreement disputes back into the civil courts, not criminal, with relatively few exceptions.

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> The court disagreed that Neo4j granted a naked trademark license, pointing out that the open source licenses granted to third-parties on the open source software repository were copyright licenses, not trademark licenses. Users of the open source version of the software did not have any right to use the Neo4j trademark without a separate trademark agreement. Naked licensing does not occur where there is no trademark license.

Neo4j used GPL by the way.

https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/articles/open-source-so...

Your reply is confusing. The previous poster said that GPL could be enforced using copyright law as opposed to filing a contract dispute.

There is clear precedent for that: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170515/06040337368/us-co...

Then you bring in the question of civil vs criminal but the point was copyright versus contract.

Copyright infringement is always in civil court. What I was getting at is that you can view a license violation as a contract dispute or copyright violation. The latter may mean high statutory damages (i.e. a pre-set range of money values that can go as high as $150K per work infringed), whereas the former does not.

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