In her ruling, Judge Shira Scheindlin notes that “Rule 37(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure permits a court to sanction a disobedient party for failing to comply with a discovery order.” In this case, the sanction was a default judgement. “Having accepted all the well-pleaded facts in the Complaint as true, Westinghouse infringed on Plaintiff’s copyright,” she concludes.
Implicit in that acceptance is that a key feature of the GPL, its requirement that further distributions also be made under the GPL, can be part of a well-pleaded case. That doesn’t mean it would hold up for this particular case once trial lawyers have their way with it, but there’s no obvious legal shortcoming to its use against Westinghouse.
Also notable here are the damages involved. Since Westinghouse had continued to ship the software after being notified of its copyright issues, Scheindlin ruled that the infringement was willful, and therefore the company deserved a trebling of damages. Despite the fact that this was large-scale, commercial copyright infringement, those damages add up to a total of $90,000.
Basically, Westinghouse gets off easy in comparison with those who have shared music on P2P sites ($675,000 and $1.92 million, in the first two cases to go to trial) because it only shipped a single software package, even though it was done for commercial gain.
Anderson and the SFC will also get legal fees, and will have the right to any unsold inventory that includes Busybox. Unfortunately, they’ll have to get in line with the rest of Westinghouse’s creditors, so there’s a chance they’ll see very little of their court-ordered cash.
In the meantime, the court case against the remaining defendants is presumably making its way through discovery, so there’s a chance that the GPL may still wind up getting its day in court.