I was always wondering about this, because I have been recently reading about many leaks and stolen programs on certain news sites:
If a program (running on a server for example, serving http clients), which is closed source and not released to the public, that uses a LGPL or GPL library gets stolen, can the owner of the program effectively* sue the thief?
- effectively – the company won’t be turned down by a judge?
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I am not a lawyer – this is not legal advise.
You have copyright over the application (or parts of it) that you wrote, so you have a legal claim your rights have been infringed regardless of the status of the open source licenses and your obligation to open-source the code you own the copy right to.
The issue over your obligation to open-source your copyrighted work is a separate legal issue. The theft of the copyrighted material owned by you is still illegal even if you have not fulfilled your obligations to the copyright holder of the libraries.
So the next question “effectively”…….How much are yo prepared to spend on lawyers…. Do you know who stole it, do you have proof…..
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