News from open source/IP attorney Heather Meeker's blog Copyleft Currents:
On February 14, 2024, the Paris Court of Appeal issued an order stating that Orange, a major French communications provider, had infringed the copyright of Entr'Ouvert's Lasso software and violated the GPL.
They ordered Orange to pay 500,000 euros in compensatory damages and 150,000 euros in psychological damages.
This incident has been going on for many years. Entr'ouvert is the publisher of Lasso, a reference library for the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol. The SAML protocol is an open standard for identity providers to authenticate users and pass authentication tokens to online services. This is an open protocol that enables single sign-on (SSO). Lasso products are dual-licensed by Entr'Ouvert under the GPL or commercial license.
In 2005, Orange won a contract with the French Electronic Administration Development Agency to develop parts of the public.fr portal, a service that allows users to interact online with the government for administrative procedures. Although Orange used his Lasso software in his solution, he did not freely transfer the rights to his modifications under the GPL or make available the source code for his modifications. Entr'Ouvert sued Orange in his 2010 case, and the case proceeded to court, with issues surrounding, among other things, proof of Entr'Ouvert's copyright interest in the software and whether the suit was properly a breach of contract. Ta. Copyright infringement…
The damages were based on both the plaintiff's lost profits and Orange's deprivation of profits. Moral damages compensate for damage to the plaintiff's reputation or other non-pecuniary damages.
Thanks to longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.