 Okay, I'd like to thank the organizers of FOSLIM to invite me to give the early talk of this year's FOSLIM. I'm going to talk about the GPL enforcement and my efforts during the last months and over a year now to enforce the internal public license in cases where you weren't respected by certain corporations and organizations. This is about the contents of the presentation. I'm trying to go through it as quickly as possible as I can imagine that there are quite a number of questions in the end. If you have any questions that are related directly to whatever I'm talking about or what is on this slide, please raise your hand and I'm trying to reply to that question during the presentation. If it's a question that is not really related to something that I'm actually stating or that I'm saying, please try to ask the question at the end of the presentation. Okay, some background about me. I'm an independent free software developer. I'm earning my living off writing and supporting free software since 97 so this can actually work. I'm mostly known for my work on Netflix or IT tables, which is the credit filtering in Netflix and this translation subsystem of the next two floor and the two six per month. I'm not a lawyer, I have no legal background, so whenever I'm stating legal terms or legal issues at this presentation, this might be wrong. I'm not a legal expert. I'm just talking about my experience with enforcing the GPL and what I've learned about legal issues involved. I think there really is too much confusion about the GPL and free software licenses if even people like the Red Hat CEO always speaks about Red Hat puts investments into the public domain when he actually wants to say that the license, whatever the result was of their investments under the new GPL. I've never seen any public domain called from Red Hat, so there's really way too much confusion. Yeah, the short legal is made, I'm going to skip about that very quickly. Again, this is not legal advice, I'm not a lawyer. Any kind of experience I'm talking about is mostly based on German copyright law and copyright law is quite different in whatever jurisdiction you play in so yeah, as I said, it's only about the German copyright law. So we're talking about the GPL, about copyright, about software. So the initial question we have to ask ourselves is what is actually copyrightable if we think about software? There has to be a certain, not everything is immediately copyrightable. There has to be a word, there has to be effort put into it. It has to be somehow, in German we have the word, Schöpfungskrieg. So not every single line you write is a copyrightable piece of software. So there has to be a certain hate of effort or whatever you put into it in order to be copyrightable. Which translates into the typical development cycle of free software projects that if somebody sends you a trivial patch that fixes a single line or something like that then his contribution to the project that he is patching is certainly not going to be copyrightable and he cannot claim that he has part of the copyright and he doesn't actually have any rights. And you also really, if you take it correctly, don't really need his approval because it's not a copyrightable contribution to the project. The question is where does it start? Where is this line? After which contribution to a free software project is copyrightable and where it isn't? That's something that isn't really defined. There is no precedent on that. However, you can ask yourself questions like did the programmer have a choice of implementation? Could he have been using different kinds of algorithms for resolving the problem or getting the work done? These kinds of questions, if the author has a choice to do it either one way or the other and this choice is not only a syntactic choice but a real choice of different implementations then you can assume that whatever is the result of that choice is probably likely to be a copyrightable work. So for me, I was surprised at the level after which something as copyrightable protection is relatively low because as all technical people in this room will know, you already have a choice even if it's only a very small part of it. So some word about terminology. Whatever is on this slide is not free software. Public domain is a different concept, freeware, shareware, hardware, POV, whatever it is, it's not free software. The rest of this presentation will cover free software of the source software for the purpose of whatever I'm going to describe in the remainder of this presentation I'm not going to make a distinction. So the rest of the presentation will probably talk about free and open source software if it's false. I don't want to take time. So as I have been enforcing the new general public license I'd like to point out a few features of the GPL that are probably not known even the people who write code and license and underdog license. The first thing to know is that the GPL is a license that regulates distribution of software. It doesn't regularly use with one small exception I'm going to describe but in general GPL regulates distribution of software and it allows distribution of software and redistribution of software under certain conditions that are outlined here. Basically you have to distinguish between distribution of the software in source code and distribution of the software in object code. So if you distribute source code you need to mention that the particular piece of software is subject to the GPL and in addition you need to copy the license full so if you distribute a GPL program you need to give a full copy of the full text of the license with it. If you distribute an object code you have three conditions. In addition to previous conditions that are also true for distribution in source code format you have third condition which is that you either include the full corresponding source code and I'm going back to this definition in a couple of slides with together with the object code or you make a written offer. The difference is that when you make a written offer this offer has to be nulled to any third party so anybody who ever requests the source code from you according to the written offer to class 3B of the GPL then you have to give in the source code. If you go for 3A and ship the source code together with the object code then you only need to give the source code to those people who actually have received the object code from you. That's the difference which a lot of people don't actually have in mind when thinking about the GPL. So what is complete source code? GPL contains a very precise definition of what complete source code is. Complete source code means all the source code for all modules in content plus any associated interface definition files plus scripts used to control computation and installation of the executable. If you interpret this you come to, well, it's the source code obviously and scripts used to control computation tend to be main files at least if you see a program with main files there might be different mechanisms with other programming languages and we have these scripts used to control installation which might be the main install or something like that which comes with the program but it could be some different form of installing the program and my interpretation of this is if you are not only shipping the software but if you're shipping a product combined of software and hardware like much of the embedded systems in the networking area we're seeing then this tool to install the executable program is actually whatever kind of software you need to put if you compile the source code to get this resulting object code running onto the device that actually is included that's an interpretation of the license that not indicated in the GPL itself but I say that this is the interpretation that I made when I did GPL enforcement I mean the intent of the license is to enable the user to modify a program and to run a modified version and if the product consists of hardware and software and you only ship software but you don't include the mechanism or the scripts or tools or whatever that are needed to install that modified software on the device then the user has no way of running a modified version and this kind of freedom of the GPL is preemptive another reason of that is actually that my position on the GPL is that if you in such an embedded case if you sign executables and your device has something like a boot loader or something and would only accept signed binaries by a certain key and the key is now shipped that again the user is prevented from exercising his freedom to run a modified version of the program and therefore this cannot be GPL compliant it's again an interpretation it's not in the license itself of course you can make a compliant according to this interpretation if you offer a possibility to install a different or to accept signatures made with different keys you don't need to publish the key use but you need to have a mechanism and this has actually been enforced out of court we don't have a court decision on that particular issue but we've been able to enforce this signing of binaries in devices out of court GPL, the enforcement time limit of course a very important issue with the question is that there are questions and a question was wouldn't be accepted if you compile your binary send it to whatever a company is offering the product and then sign it for you in referring to signed binary probably there wouldn't be anything you can do legally about that and this provides my experience and my background of course a hard case I mean what if the company goes out of business and so on and so on but yeah I'm not aware of that particular issue but probably nothing you could legally about it but yeah it's one of those lawyer cases what is the riveted work is probably the most interesting question and lots of people have been thinking about it and I'm not obviously not able to give any kind of answer to that however my position and the position that I have gained after all the discussions with lawyers and the experience from the cases so far is that I would say this is not really depending on any kind of technology you know you know deal of and signing and dynamic linking doesn't really matter what matters is how tightly are two pieces of code integrated I doubt that any court could actually decide oh this is statically or dynamically no it's about how tightly the two functional pieces are integrated and how closely they interact the mechanism of the technical mechanism of the interaction I don't think that this is actually going to be of any interest of course any kind of modification can be itself a copyrightable work but this still doesn't mean that this copyrightable work would not be subject to particular that's also an important issue that some people tend to misunderstand we have no precedent on that in Germany as far as I know there has not been any precedent so far the whole issue of enforcing software copyright is very much, how can you say that very new and there's very little precedent in this area because what happens when you know two commercial two companies are taking legal action because of proprietary software they set it out of court and they set it out of court you don't get any precedent and if you don't have any precedent then you won't be able to you know make any kind of assumptions how courts would decide or what kind of rulings they want to so however there is according to my life a significant indication that as soon as a code is written for a specific API that you could claim that it's derived so if you have, like we in IT tables we have a specific API how you write a match or a target or a connection tracking contract specific functions and this API is not it's not a standard API it's not present in any kind of other operating system or any kind of other system and somebody writes an extension for that then it is our position that this extension will be a derivative word because it's so closely integrated and uses this very specific not portable API that, yeah this is again enforced out of court we have received direct X connection tracking numbers and stuff like that from companies which actually had to comply with the GPL after a legal action being taken against them again this is just interpretation and not something that is full or legally clear derivative words with regard to protocol because that's what I'm also concerned with is obviously a very hard question when it comes to binary current models it is my position that it's very hard to claim that binary or internal models in general are not derivative words the problem is that you cannot make any kind of general assumption or general statement about that because it really needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis I mean there might be a driver that has already existed for another operating system and that has been ported to Linux and it has existed before how can it be derived from the Linux term but it's really dependent on the particular case and you cannot make a general assumption like oh yes all drivers cannot be derived word or something like that an interesting issue for example when speaking about derivative words and drivers for example is hander files hander files if they contain inline functions can certainly be copyrightable work and if they are also covered on the GPL it just says this source code is up to GPL and then the contents of this inline function ends up in your proprietary driver there you have your copyright right the GPL also has some words about collective words which don't actually have representation in German copyright laws I can just say well GPL says something but it's not something that has a corresponding pardon in the copyright legal system what the GPL says is it is not the intent to pay rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you rather the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective words so that's the first sentence in the GPL which mentions collective words and we have a second sentence which says near aggregation of another word with the program on a volume of a storage medium a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other word on the scope of this license so we have two different parts one of them is near aggregation which is like another distribution zuzer, wettem, derby and whatever I'm just mentioning zuzer and wettem because they actually include proprietary software and free software on the same CD-derby it doesn't and it disallows collective words which is for me it's a real grey area because at least in Germany we don't have anything in our response to that I'm not sure how it is in other jurisdictions and certainly there is no precedent in that case so another issue as important about GPL is what I call non-public modifications so GPL regulates distribution as soon as you distribute object codes you have certain obligations to also distribute or offer to distribute the source code so what happens if a company develops or a company downloads a free software project let's say it's the latest program and it's covered under GPL it makes a modification it never ships that modified version to any other organization or individually it never distributes it outside of the company in Germany however copyright law doesn't actually differentiate between distribution within an organization or without an organization it doesn't actually know about organizations at all all it cares is the term distribution or the translation of the term distribution is actually defined by whether or not you distribute it to somebody who is not closely related to you or who is not like a close colleague or a friend or a personal friend so when you are in a large corporation and you distribute a modified GPL license software to another department where you don't know anybody you don't have any kind of personal citizenship then according to copyright law it will already be distribution in the GPL not coming so when you do that and you really want to make it correct you have to always even inside your organization include the source code together with the binary because then you are in GPL section 3A and you have fulfilled the license however if you ownership the object code from one department to another department then you have implicitly in this written offer and the written offer has to be valid to any third party and any third party can be outside of your organization that's a really interesting thing that I came upon which I've never heard of before and which I had no idea about as again this is German copyright might be totally different than any other European or other country somewhere else so what happens when I violate the license the new GPL basically the GPL is violated when one or more of the obligations are not fulfilled and it automatically revokes the usage right so I've been saying that the GPL regulates distribution of software but not used this is the single exception so when you let's say your company A and company A uses some GPL license software it creates a modified version even a non-modified version and does not adhere to all the license conditions not copying the full license text or not mentioning the GPL license or not offering a source code or shipping a source code then you don't only lose the right which you actually don't have to make copies and distribute it because that's the copyright infringement part but you also lose the right to use that software by yourself that's the important issue and this kind of clause that automatically revokes the usage right you might think well this is really hard for them but on the other hand this is something that is present in almost any kind of software license you will look at so this is nothing that is specifically hard within the GPL but if you look at the proprietary license which with which corporations are used to be dealing they have the same process in there so GPL enforcement the interesting part and the GPL violations oh question well it's a copyright a copyright violation is always a GPL violation if copyright on the software was licensed on the GPL so I'm using the two terms interchangeably because I'm only talking about the GPL here and any GPL violation is automatically a copyright violation assuming that the GPL would be enforceable in the respective copyright system and even if it would not be enforceable in the respective copyright system then whatever user doesn't have any valid license to use the software so it's again a copyright violation so you won't be able to avoid that GPL enforcement GPL violations themselves or license violations or copyright infringement or whatever you might call it is certainly not something new and I think it's as old as free software itself the Free Software Foundation in the US I've been talking to Elon Musk last year and they've been doing GPL enforcement very quietly for a long time however and I've been doing it quietly and they're doing it in silent negotiations so you don't really hear in all that much GNU or Slash Labs type made the GPL license software to be used quite more often especially in commercial environments and in commercial products which as a result actually increases the number of violations we see as I said EFSF enforces these kinds of violations obviously it can only enforce violations where code is actually used that Free Software Foundation holds a copyright because only as a copyright holder can it actually enforce nobody else EFSF doesn't have any copyright on the Linux program it doesn't enforce somebody misusing the Linux code and not according to the GPL it's only with respect to copyright holders in the year 2003 the Linux's case was publicly well it drew a lot of attention in the party Linux's was selling 802.11 or Wi-Fi or WLAN whatever you might call it access points and routers and some of them was actually using quite a number of GPL license programs such as Busybox to Linux I.T. Tables and a number of others U.C. Litzy or U.C. Litzy's LGPL license anyway, lots of free software license components in this product and they did not appear in the license so the EFSF lots of people reported that to the EFSF and the number of copyright holders together with the EFSF involved in that the I.T. will bring access in the compliance of the GPL it was this usual quiet approach but it wasn't so quiet because somebody had posted on the news site that there was problems with I.T.S. products but Alexa enforcement was quiet nobody outside of that I.T. would actually receive any emails or see what's going on what's the status of the negotiations and so on and in the end there is my summary of what's going on is that Linux is called itself and a lot of time so what they did is first they replied that oh yes we now need to investigate and blah blah blah here is the source code and then it was like maybe 10% of whatever they required to release then it got back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and about four months later they had presumably all the source code and if you think about the wireless market it's not true in the big system but in general you have product like site it's as short as six months and if somebody can delay releasing the source code four months then basically you could say well he's buying enough time so the next product is actually being sold until he releases the source code and it's already old source code and old code so a number of developers didn't agree with that kind of slow and non-public and kind of enforcement I'm not trying to make the FSF look bad in any kind of way I mean everybody who is a copper I've ordered can do whatever kind of strategy for enforcing a license as he or she wants and what the FSF is doing is certainly valuable work but if I'm talking about my copy what I can do the kind of enforcement I think is appropriate and some developers including me did not agree with that kind of approach we said well first we need more publicity about that because if we don't have public cases then publicity will not know about that there are certain restrictions or implications of using PPL software and if they don't know we will see more and more cases we need enough publicity we need enough coverage for IT manager kind of people to be hearing about this where to prevent further PPL violations from happening that's the idea and the other thing is that the violators don't actually lose anything by first complying and then wait for I said the FSF but it could be any other copyright holder in the expected case so what you do is you build a product PPL software you don't comply with the license then you ship the product that first the user has to find it awesome the user has found it out about it he informs copyright holders the copyright holders then have to verify and think of legal action then they would negotiate and so on and in the end like after a couple of months they comply with the license but they didn't actually lose anything by not complying with the license in the first place the company release or comply with the license in the first place if they don't lose anything by waiting until somebody comes and complies and negotiates so there's no point in complying with the license initially so that was another issue so we start our own enforcement and a typical case looks like this user says as a notice about software being used in a product and we are verifying this and re-engineering the firmware images doing actually a test purchase of the device seeing if there's a written offer and so on then in the end we will send a warning notice using a lawyer send a warning notice to the respective company that you know there's something wrong with this and you're actually violating our license and please sign the letter to cease and desist this is a legal document where you say well yeah there was something wrong and we're not going to do it again from now that's where the letters to cease and desist and if you violate that letter that we signed then you actually in addition to copyright violation you have contract violation and contract penalty and that kind of stuff so if they don't sign that kind of statement you actually have to in the end go in front of court and in order to go in front of court you need some kind of technical expertise by a technical expert that's recognized by court so what we did in two cases so far is had a recognized technical expert do that study apply for preliminary injunction and in law school courses we got a preliminary injunction basically then bans the company from distributing any more of the products in order to build a DPR license that's the idea of an injunction if the statement was signed that they claim to cease and desist they're actually sitting together with them or in law as negotiating the details are things like I mean this is just about cease and desist but there might be details about the company has a couple of thousand of devices already produced which are missing the DPR license so we're going to sell them without actually opening all the boxes and putting a couple of pieces of paper and closing them again because it's just too expensive so you might probably negotiate on that and probably get some kind of donation that's what we actually had we got really another number of donations for charitable organizations all in those cases and yeah also donations are good for the public relations it doesn't really look that good if you see all they have this copyright issue how long did it take? which, voilà in Germany we have the issue that a preliminary injunction can only be granted when it's urgent and it's only urgent if it's less than four weeks after you've known that the copyright is infringed so you have to pull all of this in four weeks unless you lose the chance to obtain it for the payment that's the kind of time that you have but four weeks when you negotiate it should actually be so what we have is all the court agreements with more than 25 companies so far and that's going to be a disc of example with the next couple of slides we've obtained a preliminary injunction against the company's site it's in that manner acquired as exit points they didn't agree with the injunction so they appealed against the preliminary injunction and the appeals case was also lost and that's yeah, well in that case we have a second preliminary injunction against one of Germany's largest technology firms we haven't made a press release about that so I'm not going to say which one at this point and we have a number of more certain cases that are not public yet just because yeah, writing press releases that kind of stuff takes time and my time is limited at some point we're negotiating in more cases and we all have received quite some public awareness, interestingly more awareness from the legal community than from the software community I've received way more awareness from the legal journals inquiring about what I believe than I've received from computer magazines so yeah, that's the first slide with the number of companies it was buying the companies like U.S. Republic Siemens, BASAS phone finger-byte I think that's it some Siemens again it's like a telephone with a copy and a number of others so it's not some small garage companies but companies with large legal departments who should know better about what kind of license they use as soon as you violate the copyright license you have a classic or standard copyright violation whether you actually all of them didn't comply with the TPL so all of them did the copyright infringement so all of them had nobody, none of them was removing copyright notices but even that wouldn't be an issue because copyright notices are not required at least from in Germany so you always own the copyright on a set piece of code whether you write your name there or whether you write a number of the year there or whether you display copyright or not within the act of production that's the the German range law permission where it actually offers right of copyright okay so what we've learned is that we can actually enforce copyright licenses we've learned that a lot of companies don't take free software licenses seriously especially even those with large legal departments who should know better the reasons are here probably the financial risk of infringement was considered less than you know the expected gains and certainly this fear, uncertainty and doubt about the TPL never holding up future TPL enforcement I think it's a really important issue in free software as unpleasant as it is I'm a very technical person I like to write code I don't like dealing with lawyers there are too many of these cases coming up I think I have a number of ones the upcoming slides so far I think I know about 117 and more individual infringing products that I've received from users and numbers growing every week so there is an important issue and I think we will inevitably will have an important more often and even in other countries I think Germany is convenient for reasons I'm in Germany and since the German legal system tends to be quite reasonable and it's also convenient because it's Europe's largest market for all these kinds of computer and IT devices so nobody can afford to just not distribute a product in Germany but in other countries it's a too huge market to lose from the good point of sky I'm very interested how this is going to happen what is going to happen with the creative comments and the popular kind of content I think it will certainly be if they don't have them yet people may be using a creative comments license what kind of problems do we have one of them is distributed copyright distributed copyright I mean that if thousands of developers have worked on a project every one, every of these thousands has a part of the copyright this is a safeguard against anyone buying on the copyright you know buying in both but it can also make enforcement difficult since that's not the kind of way how the copyright system traditionally has worked you won't find other kinds of works where you have copyright distributed amongst a vast number of copyright holders what I've been doing is enforcing this cease and desist kind of thing I've not been enforcing damages so far that's because I'm not interested in money I'm interested in them complying with the license of course they have to pay the legal expenses and stuff I mean that's sure but I'm not trying to make money out of this I'm not claiming damages maybe I'm claiming them but I have not enforced any damages so far and also this wouldn't be immediately different if we go in front of court because then the court has to distribute the damages for the whole project so even though I only own a certain percentage of the copyright I can go in front of court and I can claim damages but then the damages received have to be distributed and then you have to you know have quantities of which kind of person involved in your product receives which percentage of the money is a very difficult task because you cannot really only count number of lines in CVS or something like that it's not that easy so this is a difficult issue the legal issue of having to do reverse engineering in order to prove copyright infringement is a problem actually because reverse engineering is something that can be inspected by copyright so the European Copyright Directive actually says that in order to do reverse engineering you need permission from the copyright holder but if you reverse engineer something where in the end determine that you are the copyright holder then you can get yourself the permission but if you re-engineered something and it was a negative fit then actually you infringed copyright so that's sort of an issue however the European Copyright Directive also states that you are allowed to do reverse engineering for interoperability so if the device doesn't run Linux I'm going to reverse engineering in order to make a comparison with it only the copyright holder which is in the free software world in most cases the author can enforce the copyright that's what I consider it as a problem because devices are so worldwide and are produced worldwide or software is copied worldwide and I'm only here in Germany and I'm not really feeling very confident if I for example would have it as copyright in Uruguay so that's actually an issue and one of the problems I also see is the communication problem which is getting better now but there are lots of users discovering that DPRN is running somewhere and they don't receive source code even after they request source code from their respective companies and they don't report it to copyright holders which is important because sometimes I go to some kind of web forum or something totally unreliable and I see oh somebody is basically in the thread is documenting that there is a DPRN violation going on and it's about mesh filter architectures I just moved accidentally because I was reading that report so why is it like that why don't users report it to the copyright holders that's the only way you can do something or you can even start to do something yeah that's also why I founded this DPRN violation support which is in a bad state I admit that I'm not a web designer I'm not whatever I may be a owner but I like that as a platform so people can actually record copyright issues and then I will try to confirm that and probably go after it more and more copyright holders and so on that's how the 170 recorded alleged violations I haven't confirmed on them come from and the moment this DPRN violation project is mainly only backed by me so it's a one major contribution from Alan Fox so far with the FAQs with one contribution from a person whose name I have embarrassingly forgotten but he's listed on the thanks side of the web page who did the low but apart from that volunteer is needed another issue that's about the final slide of this presentation is what can leaders free software developers do in order to facilitate later in the course of it to make it easier any kind of possible later enforcement we might have practical rules for proof by reverse engineering don't fix titles in error messages that's honestly what the technical experts the court recognized technical experts on software copyright is telling me you shouldn't fix titles in error messages because it's unlikely that somebody else who writes a similar piece of software will put this exact error message in the code so even only if you have this single string in an object file you will automatically be able to say that there is an almost infinite number of errors in the code and that's the kind of things with these experts using in order to prove that there is a copyright violation going on just by looking at the object leave obscure error messages there is an almost infinite probability that this is a copyright infringement you cannot make a 100% truth but it is already enough to convince the court make the binary contain a string of copyright message, not only in software this is important so if you just look at the object on your copyright message there then you can say well if you put it there somebody who wants to infringe can just remove it from there but then it's automatically proof that it was willful infringement which is different from accidental infringement so yes it doesn't require it recommends it and it requires we to print out a few original unlawful program and a print out if I'm not mistaken I think the ticket and if you write a device drive or something then it doesn't really interact with the user all that much so yes make the binary contain a string if you ever want to put special feature which are un-documented like a bug and it does like it's present to another router then we know it must be a copyright infringement you cannot put bugs in it but especially it will be okay it will be good so if you don't have to to check the binary check the external of the bug and it present the same yes that might also help I'm not sure whether I would recommend that the practical rules if you ever want to create damages is that you really need to keep track which amount of code is coming from there and you probably need at least the real name and email address and value mail address of the people who contributed to the project to this kind of distribution you could consider something like the FSA FLA the fiduciary license agreement you don't necessarily have to do it with the FSA I mean of course it's always nice if you assign copyright a fiduciary right to the FSA but you can even do that with your own project or something like that I mean this is basically trying to avoid this distributed copyright thing which is going to be difficult if you pay damages make also sure that employers are buying the contributions of their employees if you receive something from foobar at sysco.com then you might actually ask him whether his employer is buying and sending any kind of contributions to a free software and then bringing for the project so if you find out about it I think it's usually not good to make a company immediately because if you make a company immediately if you put it on a slashtop and then the original author only or the copyright owner who wants to enforce it only knows it like two weeks later then you have this problem that you know the company will be able to claim that oh this has been known you know it wasn't a slashtop it was public knowledge so you're hearing it starts at that point so tell the copyright owners but don't tell the company immediately and the copyright owners should immediately contact legal companies that's what I want to present my usual thanks for having me to read that I'm open for any questions I cannot comment on that the damage claim issue in Germany is and first of all can you pay damages where's the damage if you give the not fair way for free but that's too easy and it doesn't really address the issue you can always point to companies like MySQL and say they are offering alternative licensing so whoever didn't want to comply with the TVL could have contacted us and obtained another license and they would have made money therefore we can claim damages so yeah other questions back there I didn't hear the last sentence the question was do I claim the cost for the lawyers that's automatic in the German legal system so whoever loses has to pay all the legal expenses of both parties so if I always win I never have to pay any of the legal expenses in addition I'm also claiming and there's even grounds for that the amount of time that I spend reverse engineering that particular firm so I'm actually getting paid for it but that amount of time is very small compared to the amount of time you spend talking to lawyers and doing all the administrative stuff so you cannot make a business out of that believe me and it's very boring to look at the hexadee the whole day so as with any kind of other claims as I said we I don't have an exact sum but I think over the last year we have obtained something like 90,000 euro donations for free software related non for profitable organizations so I think that's also quite a success to put into the free software community application no if you look at the numbers we are talking about in this wireless market Lynxus has sold millions of wireless I'm telling you this with Lynxus because Lynxus publishes the software in German Bokeh we also have the provision that the companies actually need to tell me how many copies they made and to whom they have sold these copies so I know that but I'm not allowed to tell you the information I also know that all of these companies have very large numbers and then if you see how big the legal expense is then this is a couple of cents per device so this is not really an incentive but the danger of preliminary induction is an incentive because as soon as the preliminary induction is there you're not allowed to sell your devices anymore which is a common problem in Germany you can you can only do something like that if you have obtained a preliminary induction and then they violate any income I mean then they violation of a court ruling and in addition there is some whatever other kind of common scale which they need to take questions as long as none of the copyright holders involve with the APIs that the driver has written against has signed a statement that yes we are fine this is fully in compliance with our license terms and you cannot claim that and why it hasn't practically been enforced well I cannot tell you that case but I can tell you all the other cases because as one of the copyright holders of Netflix and Ivy Tables and a couple of other kind of things I cannot make any claim that a network driver is the derivative of the technical I could do so if I was standing better and for a copyright on I cannot do that so that's why I didn't wasn't able to do anything about that in general you also have a very hard time because with the wireless privacy that goes too far to specific about these issues how this whole business works and regulatory restrictions coming in all this kind of stuff so in the end you would probably succeed in preventing them from selling their products but you would never succeed in then opening the source code because that's also what you don't have any legal grounds you can never force somebody to release the source code that's impossible you can only force them to stop selling that product and if they want to continue they have to release the source code but if they can choose to not sell the product anymore and they don't have any obligations for the provider another question do we have yes over there you can do I mean of course if you have copyright orders and are saying your restrictions as the main hand office of the company then it's always probably the best way to go because if the main office cannot you know they cannot sell the products anymore but this is kind of an idea but I don't think it would be wise to start several legal proceedings going on amount of the companies are the same it's just multiplies the amount of work needed I mean if they release the source code in Germany Spanish people can also get the source code so yes they still cannot provide the license they cannot include a Spanish written offer or whatever in the Spanish box so in Spain then he goes to the website and then he will find the source code so it's not that much of a practical idea another question the question was to stop them to sell the product in the end by obtaining a preliminary injunction so they can still make profits until that point yes of course they can so and there's not that much you can do about it only if it's a bit of a billful infringement then actually I'm paying considerable damages or something like that but if they didn't accidentally then it's your job to find out whether this process possible and taking the action this process possible after that point okay I think we are now exactly one hour after I started so one final question I would like to not respond to that question because I really related to my question was what kind of chances I see for selling services in the open source who are regularly offering free software free software services are not something related to copyright therefore you can if you have a customer who buys it you can sell any kind of service related to free software and there's a number of companies who are selling support services for free software for example installation service yeah I mean I haven't seen that much from prior days after which doesn't come with installation program but still there are companies offering installation and configuration of that so why shouldn't it be different in free software I mean every windows license comes with installation program but still people choose to have it installed by I think that discussion not related to the content thanks for your attention if you have any further questions I'll be sticking around probably for a couple of more minutes thanks again