[gamblor956]

In Artifex v. Hancom it was ruled that because the defendants did not agree to the contract terms for a proprietary license, the terms defaulted to the GPL which they were found in violation of as a license, not a contract.

This is not what the motion for summary judgment in Artifax v Hancom ruled...

The issue was not whether the GPL was a contract, but rather what the proper measure for damages should be. The Defendant argued $0 because there was no royalty owed for the GPL license, but the court ruled that the correct measure for damages of this breach of contract should probably have been the royalty that would have been paid if Defendant had entered into the commercial licensing contract which would have applied if they had entered into the proper license for their intended use of the copyrighted material. However, as this was a motion for summary judgment and not a ruling on the merits, it has no precedential value.

And with respect to Jacobsen v. Katzer, the issue was that the Plaintiff was seeking to enforce copyright infringement provisions in lieu of pursuing the infringement as a breach of contract. The Federal Appeals court ruled that a breach of an open source contract constituted both a breach of contract and also a infringement of copyright. The point of the case was to allow a second cause of action because copyright infringement claims are easier and usually more monetarily valuable to pursue than a breach of contract claim.