On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 10:16:12AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 10:31:02PM -0800, D. Starner wrote: > > > Also, in any sane legal > > > system, it should only affect those users who willingly violate the > > > licence, > > > even after a cease-and-desist letter, and i would say they deserve what > > > they > > > get. > > > > In any sane legal system, the judge is going to find out what's going > > on from both sides before he even considers dismissing the case. That > > Ok, but we are in the case where the defendor is innocent, right ?
So? The cost of defending against the suit is still considerable. And there is no guarantee of being awarded costs even for a frivolous lawsuit, let alone collecting. > > means that the user has to hire a French lawyer to write a response to > > the statement of cause. Unless the judges are omniscient, that's what > > has to happen. > > What exactly is stopping him from hiring a local lawyer to write the statement > and sent it per letter to the judge, and how will it differ from the case > where the court of venue is local to him ? The choice of law is the french law > in both case. It's still very costly. Here's an example from the US: http://mainsleazespam.com/law/ema.html Whilst this is America, home of the bullshit lawsuit, I contend that something substantively similar could happen basically anywhere. It happened in Australia, too, again around the issue of spam, and I think there's been a similar case or two in Europe somewhere. > > And let's be honest; a court case may look obvious to us, but few > > judges have ever had a case where an open-sourceish license is > > Well, but a tentative to repeteadly harass using lawsuits will probably not be > missed by a judge. s/tentative/tendency/? Possibly not, but it's not hard to identify this sort of thing if the suits don't come before the same judge. - Matt
