Albert Silver wrote:Tom Barrister wrote:It's apparent to me that if Mr. Rajlich were to bring a lawsuit against the clones, he would need to
...identify who he was suing.
You could probably do a better job of that than I could. That's one of the problems Mr. Rajlich would face with a potential lawsuit.
There are several other hurdles that Mr. Rajlich would have to overcome:
1) Identify the author(s) of the alleged clones and bring litigation against him/her/them.
2) Prove that the author(s) stole program code from him. It wouldn't help here to sue somebody else who used the stolen code, unless it could be proven that that person knew that the code was stolen.
3) Prove that he owned the stolen code.
4) Prove that damages were suffered. The thief doesn't need to profit from the distribution of the stolen code, as long as Mr. Rajlich suffered damages (i.e. lost revenue) from its distribution.
5) Collect.
All of those are played across an international scene, against persons and'or entities whose identities are (I would assume) vague, at best.
Proving infringement can be a tall order to overcome even for software giants such as Microsoft, Symantec, Oracle, etc.---- companies with batteries of lawyers---faced with known entities based in the same country. For a one-man operation against multiple, probably largely unknown identities, spread out over various countries (or over multiple venues in one country), it's a venture that Mr. Rajlich undoubtedly sees as hopeless.
The further problem is to prove that the person or entity that's sued caused the damages, and then to prove how much (although the latter is generally up to the judge or jury). For example, suppose, for a hypothesis, that Mr. Rajlich decides to go after Mr. Houdart. Assume that Mr. Rajlich releases the source of Rybka, it's not a dervivative of Fruit (e.g. Mr. Rajlich owns the code), that Mr. Houdart (for whatever reason, forced or otherwise) releases the source of Houdini, it's proven to contain source code of Rybka, and it's also proven that Mr. Houdart either stole the code himself or knew that the source that he used for Houdini was stolen from Rybka, and also that Mr. Houdart knew that Mr. Rajlich owned the code that was used--- a lot of assumptions. Even after all of those assumptions are validated, Mr. Rajlich still has to prove that Mr. Houdart's program caused damages over and above (in addition to) damages caused by any others among the supposed clones.
Add all of this up, and it's a useless venture to try to bring litigation.
