Protecting the open-source license commons

Protecting the open-source license commons

It's not as simple as "violating copyright for commercial gain is a criminal offence". The offences in the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988 only apply if the violator has reason to believe that they're not violating; in the case I'm thinking of, the violator believed that as they were copyright owner of one part of the combined work, their license supersedes the GPL. Had they also committed the offence named in 107 subsection 2A (which requires monetary damages to the owner of the infringed copyright, not just infringement), then our legal advisor thought a prosecution might succeed; as it is, the violator raised the SFC's "principles of enforcement" as reason that they did not commit that offence.