[simion314]

That big case was about APIs but I found that of course copy pasting code is a lcense violation, but the judge/jury did not force any re-licensing

"Alsup did agree with the jury that the rangeCheck function and eight security files were a copyright infringement, but the only relief available was statutory damages up to a maximum of US$150,000"

So your argument is exactly my point, the license is not infecting your product, you have to pay damages or in case of GPL you have the OPTION to comply with the license and release the code.

Again, copy -pasting some GPL code is not magicaly transforming your other code into GPL. Or the reverse copy pasting some Oracle/Microsoft or Google code in yoru project does not make your project Oracle or MS property.

[drran]

Of course, it's not a magic, because everything is written in clear text, but it works:

> However, in this case, Donald writes, "with Cisco, years of trying to work through their predecessor's compliance problems didn't generate the progress we were hoping for, so we had filed a lawsuit. It was quickly settled, and compliance was achieved." > > There’s an even brighter silver lining to this story: Cisco later became a contributor to the GNU Project. "It really is a success story in bringing a violator into the free software community," Donald wrote.

For a proprietary code, it doesn't work because a commercial company is looking for profit.

[simion314]

>For a proprietary code, it doesn't work because a commercial company is looking for profit.

So you would prefer you had by mistake infringed on MS/Google or Oracle code then some dude's GPL shitty left pad ? For me it seems that the license is not important but who exactly you upset.

Anyway the point is the license did not infected Google code, Google had to pay damages and it could have been GPL or other proprietary license.

[drran]

Unlike GPL, proprietary licenses are not viral. They never asked for fair exchange of code, so court cannot force that.