SFLC will love the 7th Circuit

[Philippe Verdy]

Alexander Terekhov [mailto:alexander.terekhov at gmail.com] wrote:
> 3. Party A now resells the boxes to You (Party C consumer) under
> draconian contract. You are required to assign all your rights to
> software updates to Party A. This transaction doesn't fall under the
> GPL since it is permitted by Doctrine of First Sale.

This won't apply to the Linux kernel, that Google did not originate itself,
so when it distributes it, it remains under the obligation of the Linux
licence. This is not a First Sale distribution, because Google has no
exclusive right on this kernel (unless Google could convince EVERY KNOWN
AUTHORS to provide him with a transferable exclusive right, permitting
Google to apply its own copyright with the agreement of all these many
authors: this would require thousands of separate non-GPL licence agreements
with ALL those authors, accepting to relicence their code in a way that can
be sublicenced by Google). Remember: the GPL accepts no sublicences, the
original authors conserve all their exclusive rights at every depth level in
the downstream distribution.