<story><title>French court issues damages award for violation of GPL</title><url>https://heathermeeker.com/2024/02/17/french-court-issues-damages-award-for-violation-of-gpl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bdauvergne</author><text>Hi, developper of Lasso from Entr&amp;#x27;ouvert here (sorry for the english, I&amp;#x27;m more used to talk about programming than french law):&lt;p&gt;It took so much time for many reasons :&lt;p&gt;* first the judge advised us to try to mitigate, mitigation failed because Orange&amp;#x2F;FranceTelecom did not want to mitigate anything (we asked in mitigation for nearly what we won in the end),&lt;p&gt;* we returned in tribunal, and the judge asked for an expertise to see if really the fact that Orange linked their program with Lasso inside an Apache module was violating GPLv2,&lt;p&gt;* we lost on first instance,&lt;p&gt;* we made appeal and won but not on the counterfeiting accusation, only on some other kind of violation in French named &amp;quot;parasitism&amp;quot;, the fact is french juridication doctrine on &amp;quot;licences&amp;quot; was that is was a contract, and only a contract and the could only invoke civil contract law and not use counterfeiting laws,&lt;p&gt;* we did not agree with that, and neither did the european justice court, so we asked the french equivalent of the 2nd circuit (Cours de cassation) to overrule the court of appeal doctrine,&lt;p&gt;* we won in the cours de cassation,&lt;p&gt;* so we returned to the appeal court and we won.&lt;p&gt;And here we are.&lt;p&gt;The inefficiency come from many aspects :
* french judiciary lacks money and resources, it&amp;#x27;s not new, everything is slow, budget of ministry of justice by citizen, is half or one third of the same budget is germany, but for specialized justice like counterfeiting of software, it&amp;#x27;s a special court, which should be faster than for usual civil law,&lt;p&gt;* &lt;i&gt;BUT&lt;/i&gt; france is not California, litigation about software licences and especially free software licence is extremely rare, and usually between commercial entities which have real contractual obligation between them, so that the court can concentrate on the commercial aspect (you owed so much, you had to deliver this and did not, etc...) here we did not have any commercial relation with Orange on this project (we had a long time ago on other project not related to the one for which they used Lasso)&lt;p&gt;* &lt;i&gt;ALSO&lt;/i&gt; france has very special doctrine called (in french) &amp;quot;non cumul de la responsabilité contractuelle et délictuelle&amp;quot;, it means that if there is some kind of contract between you and a third party, that imposed them to not violate some law which can also be an offense&amp;#x2F;crime, the invoked responsibility can only coming from the contract and not from the offense&amp;#x2F;crime law (counterfeiting is an offense in France), so we had to break this doctrine in &amp;quot;Cours de cassation&amp;quot; before being authorized to litigate on counterfeiting.</text></item><item><author>Arech</author><text>&amp;gt; Entr’Ouvert sued Orange in 2010&lt;p&gt;How such a simple thing could take 14 years to untangle?&lt;p&gt;How could anyone trust in courts that have such a spectacular efficiency?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmoy</author><text>&amp;gt; we asked the french equivalent of the 2nd circuit&lt;p&gt;Minor note: not really the French equivalent of the 2nd circuit&lt;p&gt;US (federal) courts are like: district, appeals (e.g. 2nd circuit, 9th circuit, cafc, etc), supreme.  The circuit courts are all on the same level, they don&amp;#x27;t hand cases between each other.&lt;p&gt;French court has another layer in there?  And moreover, it&amp;#x27;s not geographically separated, but rather by subject matter? (US has only one such court, the cafc).&lt;p&gt;E.g. you can&amp;#x27;t remand from 2nd circuit down to an appeals court, because there is no appeals court underneath the 2nd circuit.&lt;p&gt;But you also can&amp;#x27;t say that court is like the supreme court, because there is a constitutional court above it, which is the analogy to the US supreme court</text></comment>
<story><title>French court issues damages award for violation of GPL</title><url>https://heathermeeker.com/2024/02/17/french-court-issues-damages-award-for-violation-of-gpl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bdauvergne</author><text>Hi, developper of Lasso from Entr&amp;#x27;ouvert here (sorry for the english, I&amp;#x27;m more used to talk about programming than french law):&lt;p&gt;It took so much time for many reasons :&lt;p&gt;* first the judge advised us to try to mitigate, mitigation failed because Orange&amp;#x2F;FranceTelecom did not want to mitigate anything (we asked in mitigation for nearly what we won in the end),&lt;p&gt;* we returned in tribunal, and the judge asked for an expertise to see if really the fact that Orange linked their program with Lasso inside an Apache module was violating GPLv2,&lt;p&gt;* we lost on first instance,&lt;p&gt;* we made appeal and won but not on the counterfeiting accusation, only on some other kind of violation in French named &amp;quot;parasitism&amp;quot;, the fact is french juridication doctrine on &amp;quot;licences&amp;quot; was that is was a contract, and only a contract and the could only invoke civil contract law and not use counterfeiting laws,&lt;p&gt;* we did not agree with that, and neither did the european justice court, so we asked the french equivalent of the 2nd circuit (Cours de cassation) to overrule the court of appeal doctrine,&lt;p&gt;* we won in the cours de cassation,&lt;p&gt;* so we returned to the appeal court and we won.&lt;p&gt;And here we are.&lt;p&gt;The inefficiency come from many aspects :
* french judiciary lacks money and resources, it&amp;#x27;s not new, everything is slow, budget of ministry of justice by citizen, is half or one third of the same budget is germany, but for specialized justice like counterfeiting of software, it&amp;#x27;s a special court, which should be faster than for usual civil law,&lt;p&gt;* &lt;i&gt;BUT&lt;/i&gt; france is not California, litigation about software licences and especially free software licence is extremely rare, and usually between commercial entities which have real contractual obligation between them, so that the court can concentrate on the commercial aspect (you owed so much, you had to deliver this and did not, etc...) here we did not have any commercial relation with Orange on this project (we had a long time ago on other project not related to the one for which they used Lasso)&lt;p&gt;* &lt;i&gt;ALSO&lt;/i&gt; france has very special doctrine called (in french) &amp;quot;non cumul de la responsabilité contractuelle et délictuelle&amp;quot;, it means that if there is some kind of contract between you and a third party, that imposed them to not violate some law which can also be an offense&amp;#x2F;crime, the invoked responsibility can only coming from the contract and not from the offense&amp;#x2F;crime law (counterfeiting is an offense in France), so we had to break this doctrine in &amp;quot;Cours de cassation&amp;quot; before being authorized to litigate on counterfeiting.</text></item><item><author>Arech</author><text>&amp;gt; Entr’Ouvert sued Orange in 2010&lt;p&gt;How such a simple thing could take 14 years to untangle?&lt;p&gt;How could anyone trust in courts that have such a spectacular efficiency?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mplanchard</author><text>Merci pour l&amp;#x27;explication, je pense que c&amp;#x27;est très claire en anglais!</text></comment>