Question

7

How can I report a suspected copyright or trademark infringement in a repo-hosted application?

rated 0 times [ 7] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 445 / 2 Years ago, wed, march 30, 2022, 3:11:36

The problem: The application Stroget looks and behaves exactly like Minitube. Flavio (the creator of Minitube) and I suspect that someone took his work and used it without Flavio's permission. The reason for our suspicion:

Stroget looks and behaves exactly like Minitube 2.0

The only difference is the welcome text when you start the application. "Welcome to Minitube" has been replaced by "Welcome to Stroget".

This is how Minitube 2.0 looks like, this is how Stroget looks like.

Minitube and Stroget are available via the Ubuntu Software Center.

Please visit Minitube's forum for more information (I would post a link, but I am only allowed to post two).

My question therefore is:

How can we contact Canonical about this, in order to analyze the situation?

Is Canonical the contact person - who is the official contact for an issue like this?

Thank you for your time and effort.

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3 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago darpose · Accepted Answer

First thing: This is up to the copyright holder to lodge any complaint. You can't do anything because it's (sincerely) none of your business.

If they feel there's a valid complaint, they can contact Canonical (see the bottom for a phone number). A DMCA notice is pointless because it's the wrong jurisdiction, but I'm sure they would listen to sense.

I would imagine the owner should also be taking other civil action against the other project if they feel there has been an infringement.

But as others have said, this is how open source works. If something doesn't work for you, GPL encourages you to fork it and fix it. The basic rules are you just don't use the same name but all that really depends on the license. That appears to be what has happened here... But similarly, this is for the owner to interpret.

Having seen Flavio's post, I'd like to make a few more comments:

Canonical should not be listing this as a proprietary download. You're right there.

Most non-opensourcerers might think blatent copying is evil but they've changed the name and they're working on your code just in their space. I can't see how people would get the two names confused either.

You can pull back fixes into your project from theirs. That's the beauty of GPL - even though they've added code, it needs to be the same license as the original.

However, there is a huge problem: Stroget has re-licensed your project as LGPL3. LGPL is more permissive than GPL so it's not compatible. They're breaking your license to them.

The relicensing is the only thing you can think to action here (IMO, but remember: IANAL) but it is a significant issue. Talk to the project leaders or contact the FSF.