Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

If I were to do this with commercial code or assets, would they be so flexible in working with me, or do they go straight to shakedown? I'll give ye all a hint: go look at the MPAA and RIAA's views on that.

I remembered when friends were back in the Napster times shook down for a few grand. Same with Bittorrent's earlier years. There was no amicable "Plz quit this and were good". In fact, they've lobbied multiple times for laws to permanently disconnect after X copyright claims.

So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving when we're surrounded by entities who'd eat every last one of us for lunch if we so much as accidentally used a copyrighted resource?

(I'm thinking no further than Netflix ripping off a photographer https://petapixel.com/2017/11/27/netflix-stole-vhs-cassette-... . Good luck for an Australian citizen to navigate international copyright law to become whole in this regard. )

Because the point of free software isn't to shake down anyone. Because we're better than that. We want to make sure software stays free, and punishing people doesn't often help. Almost all copyleft enforcement is done without judges and courts, and that's how it should be. We want more friends, not less.

This is not to mean we're pushovers. It just means we enforce free software as gently as possible. Once the software is free, there is no more conflict to resolve.

If someone was hacking on a BSD based license, and included code they mistakenly mis-identified the license, I get that. It was an accident. Mention it to them as an issue or email. It's an oversight, accidents do indeed happen.

It reminds me of the recent issue where nVidia copied some dev's code from their GH repo. The repo was unlicensed, but whomever did the copying included it as BSD license. After the dev contacted the repo owner, they fixed it (to my understanding).

These cases are accidents and oversights. And the key here is they're corrected quickly after being brought attention to.

Then you have the other class: habitual intentional infringers. Theyd lift all of Linux, and do. You like those illegal binary dumps with closed source in a release of Linux kernel? Or how about found in countless firmwares on consumer devices? Yeah, its all there, closed source badness and all. And the law allows up to $135k per violation. Ok, times 1 million devices sold. Please pay 135 billion USD.

In all fairness to Netflix it took longer than it should have (for which they apologized) but they ended up compensating the guy to his satisfaction. Now perhaps that's just because of how publicly he stated his case but in the end Netflix did do the right thing.

Edit: As for the rest of your post, you make a good point!

For most of us, I think it's because we want people to use it. And, yes, we want people to use it under certain conditions, it's not a free-for-all, but using it is an important part. If it wasn't, we'd just keep it closed.

Going straight to harsh enforcement for a violation isn't going to help with that. There are already a lot of people unwilling to consider open source for anything because they misunderstand it and think that they'll automatically open source all of their own stuff if they do. Imagine if open source copyright owners had a reputation for going immediately for a lawsuit and statutory damages upon discovering a violation!

Figure out what your goal is, then do whatever helps accomplish that goal. The behavior of organizations like the MPAA and RIAA probably doesn't enter into it.