SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC)has announcedthat it succeeded with its motion in US Federal Court to send the case backto California, where it was originally filed. The suit was filedin October 2021 by SFC, as an owner of Vizio televisions, to getthe company to comply with the GPL on some of the code in the TVs. Back in November, Vizio hadasked to move thecase to Federal Court, because the GPL is only a copyright license(which is a dispute handled at the Federal level) and not a contract (thatcould be adjudicated in state court). Friday's ruling disagreed with that premise:

The May 13 ruling by the Honorable Josephine L. Staton stated that theclaim from Software Freedom Conservancy succeeded in the "extra elementtest" and was not preempted by copyright claims, and the court finds "thatthe enforcement of 'an additional contractual promise separate and distinctfrom any rights provided by the copyright laws' amounts to an 'extraelement,' and therefore, SFC's claims are not preempted."

"The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleftlicensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both ascopyright licenses and as contractual agreements," says Karen M. Sandler,executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy. Sandler noted that manyin the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) legal community argueincorrectly that the GPL and other copyleft licenses only function ascopyright licenses.