>Assuming you can write a license for use in the USA and enforce it the world around is quite foolish.
In this case there is no reason to suspect it (the GPL or any software license) is not enforceable in France, you just have to go about it the right way and sue in the contract law courts.
As a specific wrinkle of the French system, if you sue under one system (copyright or contract), if you fail you can't sue under the other. In most countries you would not face such a restriction.
It's amazing to me that this has not come up before. Has a software license never been litigated as a copyright violation in France before? Strange.
This is a travesty. The French law makes no sense.
The victim of a tort is barred from justice simply for not being expert legal scholars or for hiring a bad lawyer.
What's even crazier, The GPL isn't even in French https://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.en.html
, and French courts don't accept English evidence, so the idea that there was a contract is absurd. (and how can France even allows "contracts" where one party doesn't even notify the other that they agree to it?!)
Also, Orange violated the contractual rights of every user of their software, not just the rights of the author. So why can't other users sue Orange? Or maybe they can? They should!
In a lot of western countries that are not the US, software isn't copyrightable as-is, only as a description of its functionality or something like that (not a lawyer, might have been the patent vs. copyright thing).
This difference means that a lot of what a litigation-centric society would assume about software (perhaps not copyright, but patents) doesn't apply elsewhere.
That said, the goals of the legal systems tend to converge: it was about protecting ideas so the people investing in it stand a chance to see a return. I wouldn't be surprised if there simply is a different system with a different name but with the same goal (yet being incompatible with a global blanket software copyright claim). I have only studied the subject for a small group of western european countries (France not included) and most of them not being based on common law makes quite the difference.
I can't think of any Western country in which software is not copyrightable as-is. There are some where software is not patentable, but that is a very different thing that is not relevant to this story.
Most countries are a signatury to the Berne Convention, so in general, copyright is pretty similar in those countries.
Patents are a different story and different countries have different pantent laws.
Because it’s a horrible mess of confusion between copyrights and patents, and even says so, so it’s hard to see what the author was thinking even posting it.
In this case there is no reason to suspect it (the GPL or any software license) is not enforceable in France, you just have to go about it the right way and sue in the contract law courts.
As a specific wrinkle of the French system, if you sue under one system (copyright or contract), if you fail you can't sue under the other. In most countries you would not face such a restriction.
It's amazing to me that this has not come up before. Has a software license never been litigated as a copyright violation in France before? Strange.