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Impact Litigation for Copyleft

Pursuant to our Principles of Community-Oriented GPL enforcement, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) engages in litigation only as an last resort when other methods to adjudicate users' rights under copyleft fail. However, when necessary, SFC engages in impact litigation in lawsuits around the world — both as a Plaintiff ourselves and by paying the legal fees of other Plaintiffs.

Current Copyleft Litigation

Our current impact litigation against Vizio is ongoing to establish users' rights under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. Please do read more about it and donate to support this work!

Past Copyleft Litigation

These past lawsuits are listed in reverse chronological order.

Sebastian Steck's AVM Lawsuit

This SFC-funded user rights lawsuit was filed by Sebastian Steck in Berlin in 2023 and received a positive final decision from the court in June 2024 with AVM providing "the scripts used to control ... installation of the executable" for the LGPLv2.1 works in the AVM router that Steck purchased. More details are available in our press release and informational page, which provides the source code that was received from AVM allowing users to modify and reinstall copylefted works into the router's flash memory:

Christoph Hellwig's VMware Lawsuit

SFC partially funded and assisted in coordination of Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in Germany. That case concluded in 2019. You can view the relevant announcements and analysis that Conservancy has published about the case below, starting with the announcement regarding the conclusion of the case:

Software Freedom Conservancy v. Best Buy, et al

On 14 December 2009, SFC filed a federal copyright lawsuit against 14 defendants, including Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC. The docket of that lawsuit is available (on archive.org) and the original complaint is on our website.

SFC settled with each defendant at different times, and the dismissals can be seen in the docket — the last occurring in September 2012. Generally speaking, and pursuant to our Principles of Community-Oriented GPL enforcement, Conservancy never settles a lawsuit unless we believe that full compliance has been achieved (or will be achieved imminently) with the terms of all copyleft licenses on all software included in the devices at issue in any lawsuit that we've filed.