GPL Enforcement Case: Vizio's Summary Judgment Motion
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Read the Transcript: Key Legal Issues Argued in Vizio's Summary Judgment Motion
Last Thursday, Software Freedom Conservancy took the next step in our ongoing litigation to liberate the complete, corresponding source code for Vizio televisions. Our lawyers argued on our behalf the core legal issues at the center of our case against VIzio. The motion and responses were filed in the weeks prior to the hearing and in-person oral arguments took place before Judge Sandy N. Leal of the Superior Court of California, County of Orange on Thursday, October 5, 2023.
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How I watched a Motion for Summary Judgment hearing
In SFC's ongoing lawsuit against Vizio asking to receive the source code for the copylefted components on their TVs, last week we had a hearing with the judge to discuss the Motion for Summary Judgment that Vizio filed (requesting that the court reject our case before it even went to trial). A couple of our staff attended in-person (in an Orange County courthouse in Southern California) while others, like myself, watched remotely.
I was hoping to be able to use a standard interface to view the proceedings (such as streaming video provided to a <video/> element on a webpage), but unfortunately that was not available. The only way to view hearings in this court remotely is via Zoom, which SFC has talked about recently. This presented me with a conundrum - do I join via Zoom to see what was said? Or am I prevented from accessing this civic discourse because the court chooses not to use a standard video sharing method, preventing a large segment of society from taking part? As part of their normal practice, the court does not record (nor allow recording except through an official court reporter that can be hired by the parties to take a textual transcript) of proceedings, so I needed to decide with some urgency how to proceed, as failing to join now would mean I couldn't see the hearing at all, neither now nor in the future.
I am not sure how other countries approach this problem, and maybe it is no different elsewhere, but it did concern me deeply how this technical decision to demand the use of proprietary software could leave so many people disenfranchised, both with respect to their legal system, and other public services as well.
As part of SFC's policy to allow the use proprietary software if it is critical to our mission, I decided that it was more important for me to be able to view the proceedings (and avoid charging many hundreds of dollars to SFC for an international flight and hotel). Note that SFC would never require this of me, and would gladly pay for me to attend in-person to avoid the proprietary software, but I felt personally it was the right decision for me to make in this context.