First GPL Lawsuit in the USA

Monsoon Multimedia, an American company and software vendor is taken to court for violating the GPL license. Before this all, GPL violations used to be resolved by letters from open-source organizations - which in this case is the Free Software Foundation - that presented the violations.

Yesterday, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced the filing of the first U.S copyright noncompliance, on the basis of violating the GNU General Public License on behalf of its clients. SFLC's clients are the developers from BusyBox, an application that embeds a set of standard Unix utilities. It is licensed under the General Public License version 2.

The BusyBox team tried to talk to the Monsoon Multimedia company, to convince them to respect the conditions of the GPLv2. This action was a failure, so BusyBox went to SFLC, who filed suit against Monsoon. On Monsoon's website, there is an acknowledgement that their products include BusyBox, but they didn't provide the source code, so anyone can modify the program, as the GPL requires. Monsoon are oriented on creating consumer devices for home multimedia users, and one of their well known products is Hava, a TV recorder with time-shifting that resembles SnappySoft or SlingBox software.

The irony of fate: Monsoon Multimedia's CEO is a reputed, highly-experienced lawyer, Graham Radstone, who has an MA in Law from the Cambridge University, in England, and had a top management job at Philip Morris and another high position in a $1billion private multinational company.

Erik Andersen, developer at BusyBox stated: "We licensed BusyBox under the GPL to give users the freedom to access and modify its source code. If companies will not abide by the fair terms of our license, then we have no choice but to ask our attorneys to go to court to force them to do so."

The complaint requests that an injunction should be issued against Monsoon Multimedia and the litigation costs and damages should be given to BusyBox.