[paulhauggis]

Nobody gets this outraged when companies that violate the GNU license get taken to court and you can use the exact same reasoning as the pirates (When you use open source in a proprietary app, the original is still in tact. The only thing we don't get are the changes, so nobody really gets hurt).

[rickmb]

People get outraged at the abuse of copyright by corporations against the common good.

Whether that abuse comes in the form of violating copyright or protecting copyright is irrelevant. Copyright isn't the ethical issue here. The abuse is.

[tikhonj]

Just because both the GPL and the media industry both rely on copyright does not make them equivalent. If anything, it's exactly the opposite--a company not complying with the GPL is making information inaccessible to the public; a company enforcing normal copyright is also making information inaccessible.

The GPL is basically an inversion of standard copyright: where copyright is normally used to restrict access, the GPL ensures access. So it's pretty easy to see how not complying with the GPL is similar to aggressively pursuing piracy or using horrible DRM.

[mikeash]

Nobody goes to jail due to GPL violations. If the police were conducting raids, seizing servers, and throwing people in jail for years for GPL violations and people still weren't outraged, then it might be time to talk about a double standard.

[cynicalkane]

What would that even look like? GPL code can't be mass pirated by an army of private users, as with TPB--because it's free. And if some major players stole GPL code for commercial use, that would be remedied with a lawsuit, if at all.

[mikeash]

Indeed. A company commits mass GPL infringement (e.g. shipping GPL code to a million customers without following the terms of the license) and it gets settled with, at most, a minor lawsuit. A different company helps its users commit mass copyright infringement (linking to torrents) and its servers get raided and its officers sent to jail.

[pyre]

I might find your argument somewhat valid if RMS was able to pressure the Swedes to execute a raid against a proprietary software company, and send people off to serve prison sentences.

  > When you use open source in a proprietary app,
  > the original is still in tact

One thing that you're completely missing here is that by including it in a proprietary app without attribution, you are implicitly claiming that the work is your own. When was the last time that a college student downloading an mp3 claimed that he was artist that created the track?

GPL violations and media piracy only share copyright as a common thread, but copyright isn't the entire picture.