[wp-hackers] Copyright violations by plugin in the WordPress plugin directory.

[Andrew Ferguson]

> I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, just (apparently) ignorant:
> which are the lines that forbid 1) copying without attribution and 2)
> not notifying the original developer?

With regard to your first point, based on GPLv3, Section 5 (a): "The work
must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a
relevant date." This fact, in combination with the fact that the original
creator of the work retains the actual copyright leads me to believe that
the copying must include attribution.

With regard to your second point, I do not believe the original developer
has to be notified.

> It's also worth pointing out that there are no notices of copyright in
> Joost de Valk's code available at
> http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/, so even if your
> interpretation is correct the ripoff has nothing to maintain.

This may be a moot point. I don't know about the Netherlands, but in the
United States, copyright is automatically granted with or without a
"copyright" sentence. In short, de Valk's claims of infringement could
actually bolstered by the lack of GPL inclusion because he should still
retain all rights to his work.

However, I think that since it's a requirement that all work posted on on
wp-plugins.org has to be licensed under GPL or GPL-compatable, de Valk's
code does have a de facto GPL license attached to it.

de Valk's best bet might be to send a nice email to the wordpress.org folk
and state his case and if that doesn't work, send a DMCA takedown notice
(yea, ick I know).

-Andrew, IANAL

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Austin Matzko <if.website at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Joost de Valk <joost at joostdevalk.nl>
> wrote:
> > On Jun 27, 2008, at 10:58 PM, Alex King wrote:
> >
> >> http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php
> >>
> >> #1 & 2 under TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND
> >> MODIFICATION likely apply here.
> >>
> >>
> > Yup, think so too. (though IANAL) what's a man to do?
>
> I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, just (apparently) ignorant:
> which are the lines that forbid 1) copying without attribution and 2)
> not notifying the original developer?
>
> In the sections Alex King points to, I see requirements that the
> derived work must maintain license compatibility with the GPL, which
> this ripoff plugin has done explicitly.
>
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Dan Coulter <dan at dancoulter.com> wrote:
> > The original author of the code holds the copyright, and the GPL states
> that
> > you must maintain the copyright notices of the code that you use.
>
> The closest thing I can find to that is that one must "keep intact all
> the notices that refer to this License," which isn't quite the same,
> and is obeyed by the ripoff in invoking the GPL.  Could you quote the
> section you had in mind?
>
> It's also worth pointing out that there are no notices of copyright in
> Joost de Valk's code available at
> http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/, so even if your
> interpretation is correct the ripoff has nothing to maintain.
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