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December 10, 2009: Ruling on Summary Judgment

The Court has ruled on both sides' motions for summary judgement. The ruling is a very positive result. Some highlights, in the order they appear in the decision:
  • The JMRI decoder definition files are copyrightable. (Page 5) All of Katzer's contentions that they were "merely duplicates" of NMRA information, "mere spreadsheets of data", etc, were rejected.
  • Katzer's misuse of the decoder definition files damaged JMRI, and we can hold him accountable for that. (Page 6) Katzer had argued that since we distributed our work "for free", there was no harm in misappropriating it. The Court said this was not a valid legal argument. That decision helps both JMRI and other open-source projects. (This decisions is the second time that Courts have slapped back Katzer's claims, and in the process made good law for FOSS)
  • Katzer cyber-squatted on "decoderpro.com". (Pages 6-8) We still have to show what he intended when he did that, which is a question of fact to be decided at trial, but all the other pieces are in place to show that what he did was illegal. We don't expect much trouble proving his intent at trial, as he'd done this to other people before, and knew that DecoderPro was the name of our software.
  • Katzer did infringe JMRI's copyrights on the decoder definition files, in violation of the law. (Page 8) The Court ruled that his is "liable" for this, the civil equivalent of "guilty". All that's left for trial is to show the amount of damages, but it's already decided that they do exist (see above), and that he must pay them.
  • JMRI did not infringe Katzer's copyrights on the QSI manuals while creating decoder definitions. The Court found that
    1. we had a license from QSI to create the decoder definitions, despite Katzer's contention that we didn't, except he forgot to tell us (page 9),
    2. we used the material fairly (page 9)
    3. Katzer's counter-suit for $6 million was a "litigation tactic barred by the equitable doctrine of laches", in other words he made the claim up for the purpose of setting a trap.
    This was a decisive rejection of Katzer's arguments.
  • Katzer violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) when he removed the copyrights from the JMRI decoder definitions he misappropriated. (page 10-11) We still have to show intent at trial, as that's a question of fact which Katzer has not yet admitted to, but we have little doubt we'll be able to do that. This part of the decision is also a victory for open-source in general, as it demonstrates that our copyright notices must be respected, not just removed to make it easier to hid misuse of open-source software.
Together, this set of decisions is a complete victory for JMRI at this stage of the proceedings.

There is still a lot more to be done. Katzer may be able to drag out and raise the cost of the preliminaries to trial. We're going to have to raise the money to persist, and find people to help with various things that still need to be done but in the end we're going to win this.

It's been a good day.

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