On 29.02.2016 18:34, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

For those who care about our GPL license. :)

http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20160225-vmware-gpl/

Hi Nemo, dear Harald, Don't know, if you are the right persons to address, but anyways, please forward if you know to whom:

... in German copyright law there is the concept of fading. If the original work by one author has been edited to an extent that it is barely recognizable, his original work has faded and so have his rights. [...} So if (...) this is still an open question, it might very well be the case that the court would request a techncial expert report to clarify this to the court.

Let me suggest to proactively ask the modifiers to join to execute their rights and sue the plaintiff a well, and state in-court that this will be the case. In a case that I had to fight in a German court that was enough to make the judges not to dig any deeper.

In another court case in Germany, the fsf, represented by a lawyer of their Berlin office, managed to transfer all copyrights of all authors of GNU/linux to a person involved in the case for the duration of that hearing, if I recall that right. Maybe taht is another option.

Purodha