GPL violations, where and how to report?

[T.Kuranari]

Hello, I don't know where else I can ask , so I hope to get some advice here.

Lets say a person has developed a site template and released for free under the GPL license. Now another person downloaded that template and used it on his own site. But he has made modifications to the code and removed all of the GPL copyright notices. But that's not enough. The d*ck person is taking advantage of the original template coder's work and is providing the template for download on his own site under the Creative Common license. His condition for license obliage is that users who downloaded and use "his" template aren't allowed to remove the backlink to his site. As if that's not bad enough, other sites (template download sites) are starting to redistribute the template, believing that everything is fine with this template. Informing the other sites about the whole story didn't affect anything because they either didn't believe a thing or just don't get gpl or license models in general.

Now my question is, what to do? Is there any gpl police or something on the web, dealing properly with gpl violations? Inform the web hosts about this gpl violation? What if the web hosts won't do anything? What else can be done?

Thank you.

 

[Rydian]

The issue with web sites is there's very few ways to do something. If you have a title section, nav section, and content section, there's a finite number of ways to arrange them. However if resources (such as images and such) were taken, then you may have standing as that's far easier to deal with.

Show us both of them so we can see what's up.

 

[Blood Fetish]

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html

Straight from the horse's mouth. It is a semi-involved process, so figure out how important this is to you.

 

[T.Kuranari]

Hello, thank you for the replies Oh it's not me that made the template, I'm no coder and I couldn't verify whether a similar looking template has been stolen or not anyway. It was a close friend of mine who made the template and told me about it and if he says so, I believe him. The problem is, my friend is not willing to do anything about it. He believes it's not worth the effort, it's not that he is losing any money. It just pisses me off personally that some butthole took advantage of my friend.

Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license.

So does this mean it's useless to try doing something about it as long as you're not the copyright holder, meaning only my friend himself can do something about it?

 

[Rydian]

From a legal standpoint you can't make him do anything anyways, so in this situation it's not worth the effort.

But I have to stress AGAIN that a lot of web template "theft" is just a mistake, unless it's obviously 99% a mirror image or something like that... and in any case, if the template has been changed enough it may no longer be a derivative of the original, meaning it won't be touched by GPL.

 

[JoostinOnline]

Is this a real case, or are you just imagining someone you could tattle on?

 

[T.Kuranari]

Hello,

From a legal standpoint you can't make him do anything anyways, so in this situation it's not worth the effort.

But I have to stress AGAIN that a lot of web template "theft" is just a mistake, unless it's obviously 99% a mirror image or something like that... and in any case, if the template has been changed enough it may no longer be a derivative of the original, meaning it won't be touched by GPL.

Well, that's too bad. If it's really pointless for me to try at all, then I won't bother. My friend is certain that the culprit has stolen his template because the culprit had missed a small copyright notice in a css file, but unfortunately he noticed it afterwards and removed it.

Is this a real case, or are you just imagining someone you could tattle on?

It's a real case of course. You could've figured that out by reading my previous post