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10 IFOSS L. Rev. 1 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/ifosslr10 and id is 1 raw text is: GPL-3.0 in the Chinese Intellectual Property Court in Beiiing GPL-3.0 in the Chinese Intellectual Property Court in Beijing Lucien CH. Lin,a Navia Shen,b (a) Legal Adviser, Open Culture Foundation; (b) IP Counsel, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. DOI: 10.5033/ifosslr.vl Oil.126 Abstract With the increasing use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the world, the licensing issues and disputes regarding such licenses have been litigated in various jurisdictions. In the past, these lawsuits were concentrated in Europe and the United States, but less so in the Asia Pacific region. However, in 2018, the specialized Intellectual Property Right Court in Beijing, China, acting as a court of first instance, issued a decision in a software copyright infringement lawsuit related to FOSS. The defendant chose to invoke the copyleft mechanism in the GNU General Public License 3.0 (GPL-3.0) license as a defense against claims of copyright infringement. Although the court did not directly interpret the GPL license at this stage, the decision strongly implies that the GPL and the other FOSS licenses can be treated as valid in China. Even so, quite a number of details regarding the use of the GPL in China still require clarification, included as to how the license can substantially be enforced and implemented. Keywords Copyleft, GPL, derivative work, copyright infringement Although most of the academic opinions are positive, many commentators and practitioners did have doubts about whether a Free and Open Source Software license written in English could be enforced legally in China. After all, in 2014 the China Open Source Software Promotion Union (COPU)2 once published a draft of COPU Open Source General License Agreement V.1.0.3 The text of COPU 1.0 was written purely in Simplified Chinese language and was meant to be used as an alternative solution in China for Chinese Free and Open Source Software projects. The COPU 1.0 actually was not used in any released Free and Open Source Software project due to the resource limitation for project development, and this license lasted only at the stage of public comments. However, the draft and publication of the COPU 1.0 reflected concerns as to whether Free and Open Source Software licenses written in foreign languages could be enforced in full in China without 1 As discussed in YANG XIA, Introduction to Software Protection under Chinese Law, http://ifosslawbook.org/china/, Section Analysis of FOSS Under China Law. 2 http://www.copu.org.cn/about [retrieved June 2018] 3 https://www.oschina.net/news/52060/coup-license-comment [retrieved June 2018] 1 International Free and Open Source Software Law Review Vol. 10, Issue 1