[MPlayer-users] GPL Violation in Medion MD86597 Mediaplayer

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 09:04:23PM +0200, Henrik Niehaus wrote:
> I contacted Medion, but they simply stated, that they are not able to
> provide me the source code (probably because they don't have it and
> would have to ask skymedi).

You should inform them that as the persons distributing it they are
responsible of a copyright violation by not providing it, since
they do not have a license at the very least for all code by me.
Since this software is obviously a substantial part of their device,
they risk losing a substantial part of their income from it should
I or any other developer feel forced to take it to court, and in
addition they would permanently lose any right to ever again use
any part of MPlayer code without negotiating a license beforehand.
This might trickle down to them being unable to e.g. distribute
Ubuntu.
So they should very seriously put pressure on skymedi and move
against them to reduce their own liability.
Even more since since with the GPLv3 they have a certain time
window to resolve this without having to negotiate a license
re-instatiation.
Though in general I'd advice to not be too aggressive at first,
I don't want to scare people away from OpenSource, but it should
be clear that complying to our licenses isn't any more optional than
paying for a license when selling a computer with e.g. Windows,
and they as distributors have a legal responsibility to ensure
their goods are appropriately licensed, whether they contain
proprietary or OpenSource code.

> Are there ways to force the GPL compliance (gpl-violations.org, FSF) ?
> This project is the copyright holder, so I wanted to ask here first.

No, there is no common copyright holder, the individual authors (like
me) are.
The FSF already have permission to go after violations for FFmpeg, but by
the output you gave it is not certain how much code from them they include.
If it is the only way, and if gpl-violations for example are willing,
we can discuss signing over certain rights to them or otherwise
cooperating.
However I am low on time, so I strongly prefer any solution that
involves as little of my time as possible.