Copyleft Currents

A new opinion from the 9th Circuit, filed December 16, 2024, may change the way we think about copyleft licensing. It’s rare for the courts to opine on what constitutes a derivative work under copyright law, even less so for software. The interpretation of copyleft licenses–GPL and AGPL in particular–turn heavily on the notion that integrating code creates a derivative work. This idea is particularly bound up in the text of GPL version 2, which uses the term derivative work liberally (albeit inconsistently) as a basis for exerting control over licensing of integrated libraries.

Two Software Giants

Remini Street and Oracle are direct competitors engaged in a long and expensive legal war. Remini Street offers support services for various Oracle software, notably PeopleSoft software (which handles HR and similar tasks). Oracle wants to stop them.

Oracle first sued Rimini for copyright infringement in 2010. In a prior leg of this legal journey, the trial court found that Rimini infringed on Oracle’s copyrights by engaging in “cross use.” (This term is not common, but it apparently means applying software updates to multiple users.) Rimini then updated its business practices and sought a declaratory judgment that its revised “Process 2.0” did not infringe Oracle’s copyrights. Oracle counterclaimed for copyright infringement, seeking more than one billion dollars in damages.

At summary judgment, the trial court held that Rimini had infringed Oracle’s PeopleSoft copyrights and that an update created for the City of Eugene’s PeopleSoft implementation was a “derivative work” of Oracle’s software. The district court then entered a permanent injunction against Rimini, ordering it to delete certain software files.

The trial court held that Rimini-written files and updates developed were infringing derivative works because they only interact and are useable with Oracle software. (Oracle Int’l Corp., 2023 WL 4706127, at *66.) In effect, the district court adopted an “interoperability” test for derivative works—if a product can only interoperate with a specific copyrightable work, then it must be derivative of that work.

However, the 9th Circuit disagreed, saying “Mere interoperability isn’t enough.” The court distinguished translations, abridgments, and other examples of derivative works, named in the copyright statute’s definition, from interoperable software that does not substantially incorporate the original work, noting, “Whether a work is interoperable with another work doesn’t tell us if it substantially incorporates the other work.” It recited that “Rimini claims that thousands of its files fall into this category—programs that are interoperative with Oracle’s PeopleSoft but do not contain Oracle’s copyrighted code. Without more, mere interoperability isn’t enough to make a work derivative….Instead, a derivative work must actually incorporate Oracle’s copyrighted work, either literally or nonliterally. …[S]imply being an extension or modification of a copyrighted work without any incorporation is not enough to create a derivative work.”

The court declined to reach a conclusion on two other interesting points of copyright law in software licensing: whether Oracle’s customers are ultimately owners or licensees of their copies of Oracle’s software, and whether Rimini could rely on the “essential step” defense under § 117(a)(1), which allows running of software without a copyright license. Both of these are key to enabling third parties to host and manage software for customers who have purchased licenses from software vendors.

Effect on Copyleft

This new opinion is potentially relevant to the interpretation of GPL, particularly GPL version 2. One premise of copyleft is that the license can only control activity that requires a copyright license. Otherwise, there is no need to adhere to the license terms. But when GPL 2 was written, exactly what copyright covers was unclear. So, downstream developers of GPL have always pondered this question: if I create a library that interoperates with the GPL program, but is a separate dynamically linked library, must it also be provided under GPL or a compatible license?

This question was first brought into focus by developers who wanted to create proprietary loadable kernel modules (LKMs) for the Linux kernel. LKMs are, by definition, within the same executable process as the kernel, which is covered by GPL, but separate, dynamically linked, library files. (Similar questions exist for, say, libraries in user space that operate with GPL programs in user space, but the LKM question is the quintessential embodiment of this question, so I use it here as a proxy for the larger question.)

In particular, the practical question is whether proprietary LKM developers can distribute their LKMs, allowing customers to run them in a “meal kit” manner. The argument goes like this:

• Customers all enjoy the rights of GPL, and therefore can use the GPL-licensed kernel freely.
• Vendors enjoy the rights of GPL, and can distribute the kernel under GPL freely.
• LKMs are separate files from the kernel, not built into the same executable except by reference at runtime.
• This reference requires reference to a kernel API.
• While the customer may create a derivative work by combining the kernel and LKM at runtime, creating a derivative work does not trigger source code sharing–only distribution does that.
• The LKM’s use of the API does not create a derivative work.
• Therefore, neither the vendor nor the customer is violating GPL.

The opposite position is that an LKM is a derivative work, regardless of whether it is distributed separately. This turned on the idea that in order to be interoperable, the LKM library had to include a portion of the kernel–its relevant API–which made it derivative.

This new opinion puts paid to the idea that an LKM is necessarily a derivative work, at least in the 9th Circuit. But it leaves open the question of whether an LKM might contain substantial portions of the kernel and therefore still be derivative. Indeed, any LKM would contain some elements identical to its interoperable code–such as interface definitions (APIs) or header files. No US court has created precedent on whether those are necessarily substantial.

However, we got close, once. Functional elements of code enjoy no copyright protection. In the past, many have reasoned that an API is, by definition, functional. This question was at the forefront of the Oracle v. Google lawsuit, where Google was accused of copying portions of the API for Java. The trial court (Judge Alsup, also in the 9th Circuit) held that APIs are not protectable, and therefore copying an API was not infringement, However, that ruling was later overturned (on appeal in the Federal Circuit), causing that case to go into a different doctrinal direction.

It’s my view–and I doubt I will be alone–that it is functionally identical to say that (a) per Remini Street, mere interoperability does not create a derivative work, and (b) per the Alsup opinion in Oracle v. Google, APIs standing alone are not protectable. The two opinions yield the same result, via different doctrinal paths. So perhaps, this new opinion restores the conclusion that many believed correct in the Alsup opinion.

Will it Matter?

Oracle v. Google was the last time a US court of appeals issued a meaningful opinion on the topic of software derivative works. That the Federal Circuit and 9th Circuit would come to different conclusions will surprise no keen follower of copyright law. The Federal Circuit, specially created to hear patent cases, is known to be exceptionally friendly to broad interpretations of intellectual property rights; the 9th Circuit, less so.

While this new opinion might put added wind into the sails of those making the time-honored LKM argument, it may not ultimately matter. This question has been a legal unknown for decades. In the meantime, most developers of LKMs have released them under GPL for practical reasons. That’s because, in all these years, the ambiguity of this legal question allowed GPL advocates, and community pressure, to settle the issue de facto. Most people stopped bothering with the LKM argument years ago.

Moreover, the Oracle v. Remini Street case is not over. The opinion does not dispose of the whole case, and is only precedent in the 9th Circuit. But opinions on topics like these are so rare that this one is likely to influence later courts who may examine the definition of software derivative works.

(Note: This blog post quotes heavily from the court’s opinion. Items with quotation marks are from the opinion, but other portions of this post are not marked with quotation marks. I did this for ease of reading. Also, the opinion contains related discussion of Lanham Act claims and license interpretation, which I have omitted.)

This week, there was some interesting movement in one of the many copyright claims relating to AI.

Anthropic, the maker of Claude (my personal favorite AI for coding!) reached an agreement to settle parts of an ongoing lawsuit, Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic, filed October 18, 2023. The case has a long list of music publishers as plaintiffs. The current docket is available in RECAP here.

The court approved a settlement, but it is limited in scope. The settlement resolves only one aspect of the injunctive remedies sought by the plaintiffs. Anthropic agreed to:

• Maintain certain “already implemented Guardrails” in its current products that are designed to prevent the model from reproducing lyrics
• Apply these Guardrails on its new releases
• A process allowing the plaintiffs to notify Anthropic that Guardrails are not effectively preventing the output

The plaintiffs’ demand for a preliminary injunction to bar Anthropic from training future models on their song lyrics is still pending.

This week, as a Thanksgiving present to the tech industry, Deno Land petitioned the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel Oracle’s JavaScript trademark.

JavaScript–which helpfully has little to do with Java–is a programming language for client-side web applications. Most of the interaction between you and websites, like filling in forms in e-commerce sites, uses JavaScript. It is a ubiquitous language. JavaScript was developed by Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications, in the 1990s. The trademark was acquired by Oracle Corporation in its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Deno Land is the company behind the Deno project, a modern JavaScript runtime. A JavaScript runtime is the environment where JavaScript code is executed, including outside of a web browser. The most famous JavaScript runtime is Node.JS, which was developed by Ryan Dahl, the founder of Deno Land.  Node.JS is also wildly popular.

Programming languages usually don’t enjoy much trademark protection, because they tend to be enabling technologies rather than commercial products. Most popular programming languages have accepted standards for their development that are set by standards organizations rather than single owners. After all, programming languages are much more useful if many developers use them, instead of a few. A trademark is the way to distinguish the official source of products, and for successful programming languages, this role typically falls to standards bodies rather than any one organization. JavaScript, for example, is governed by the ECMA-262 standard for ECMAScript. 

Brandon Eich, one of the key developers of JavaScript, quipped that the name “ECMAScript” was a compromise between the organizations involved in standardizing the language, especially Netscape and Microsoft, whose disputes dominated the early standards sessions. “ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease.” If the mark is declared generic or abandoned and no longer owned by Oracle, there is hope that the standard could finally be named after JavaScript.

The petition alleges primarily that the trademark has been abandoned, and that JavaScript is now a generic term, and not associated with Oracle. Neither Sun nor Oracle ever really exploited JavaScript as a commercial product, but Oracle has, according to the petition, engaged in enforcement activity to prevent others from using the name–thus endearing itself to the tech community in its usual fashion.

The petition says:

An open letter to Oracle discussing the genericness of the phrase “JavaScript,” published at https://javascript.tm/, was signed by 14,000+ individuals at the time of this Petition to Cancel, including notable figures such as Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, and the current editors of the JavaScript specification, Michael Ficarra and Shu-yu Guo. There is broad industry and public consensus that the term “JavaScript” is generic.

It’s time for Oracle to do the right thing and relinquish its hegemony here. JavaScript has enough trouble with its “THIS” keyword, without a trademark burden to make it worse

This post is mostly about Puter, a great new open source project that is building a web-based operating system.

I decided to try it out. Now, I used to be a software engineer long ago, but occasionally I like to try my hand at coding in the 21st century. Puter apps are written in HTML/Javascipt, which is the basic coding for all web pages. They are not hard languages to learn, and there are plenty of online tutorials, development environments, and resources to write programs in these languages. Puter also provides a nice little playground to try out your programs as you write and debug them. I also made use of Claude from Anthropic, which is a pretty amazing AI to write code, and has a free tier.

Using all this, and some help from nice friends at Puter, I cobbled together a very simple program for my law practice.

The LEDES Problem

If you are a lawyer, you may already know this, but many companies require–or at least prefer–legal invoices to be delivered in a format called LEDES. LEDES is an outdated, clunky, deeply horrible standard. If you have used any of the biggest legal invoicing platforms, like Legal Tracker, CounselGo, Coupa, or Brightflag, you have probably used this standard, whether you know it or not.

LEDES is a pain because it is nearly impossible to create an invoice in this format by hand. It uses plain text with an odd delimiter (try to find | on your keyboard), requires complete invoice information on every line item, and has various unnecessary fields and other clunky features. So if you have to produce a LEDES invoice by hand, you are in for an unpleasant hour or two. Why would you need to do that? Well, some clients refuse to accept anything else, or use billing platforms that don’t allow you to do manual input.

You can get a service to prepare a LEDES invoice for you, and it costs about $100 per invoice. Yes, that’s right. If you are a solo lawyer sending out invoices for a few thousand dollars, that’s a bite into your pocket money. I never want to pay such a fee again, and I never want anyone else to, either. So I decided to make my program available under an open source license. That means you can run it locally if you prefer, but the easiest way is to run it on Puter here.

Puter is Liberating

Deploying on Puter was easy and quick. It’s free for developers. And my little program does not even scratch the surface of what you can do. For example, you can use file storage, databases, GPT-4, DALL-E, and other features that would otherwise be very annoying to access with Javascript.

My little LEDES program is just the first version. It is functional but clunky. It surely has bugs. I plan to improve it in the near future. For example, I intend to improve the input screen, and help with useful defaults. But in the meantime, enjoy, and don’t let the billing platforms get you down!

(Note: I am an advisor to Puter, so please consider that I am not unbiased in my praise for the platform.)

Recently, Bungie, the developer of the Halo and Destiny video game series, won a judgment of just over $60,000 against AimJunkies, a cheat and mod site. The lawsuit arose because AimJunkies was selling cheats for Destiny 2, a free-to-play online first-person shooter with over 10 million players. In the complaint, Bungie explained the problem with the cheat codes:

Destiny 2 rewards players for their gameplay skills with items, seals, and titles, and these rewards are visible to other players.  Cheaters earn the same rewards without the requisite gameplay skill.  When cheating occurs, or when there is a perception that players are cheating, then non-cheating players become frustrated that cheaters obtain the same rewards and stop playing.”

From the Complaint filed 06/15/21

The complaint was filed based on copyright and trademark infringement, breach of contract, as well as DMCA (Circumvention of Technological Measures to control copyright). 

The copyright claim may sound like a bit of a stretch. A cheat code, standing alone, probably isn’t a copy of anything protectable. I would have expected the defendant to raise this issue, but it’s hard to tell what happened from the public documents. There was a motion for preliminary injunction in June of 2022. It explains that the defendant was actually creating copies of the game–or at least part of it:

to create cheat software that includes these features, Defendants necessarily copied the Destiny 2 software code that corresponds to key attributes in the Destiny 2 video game, such as the data structures for player and combatant positioning 

Well, perhaps. Data structures are at the bleeding edge of copyright law. But if you find the copyright claim unconvincing, the complaint had plenty of other ammunition as well.

The defendants had downloaded Destiny 2, and therefore agreed to the terms of its end user license, which expressly prohibits the user to:

hack or modify Destiny 2, or create, develop, modify, distribute, or use any unauthorized software programs to gain advantage in any online or multiplayer game modes.

Cheating might seem harmless on face, but keep in mind that Destiny 2 is a multiplayer online game that is free to play, but charges for in-game purchases. In contrast, cheat codes in single player games don’t usually concern the game publishers as much.  If you buy a mod that helps you grow cash crops faster in Stardew Valley, no one really suffers, other than perhaps your friends who envy your lush and beautiful farm. In fact, Stardew Valley, a hugely popular game, supports a wide library of cheats, which only seem to make the game more popular. 

But cheats in multi-player online games like Destiny 2 can give you an advantage against other players, and that messes with the developer’s business model. In other words, the developer wants to be the only one able to sell advantages, and to control how much advantage they provide. But to be fair, for Destiny 2, there seems to be disagreement among players as to whether the legitimate in-game purchases provide you with any real advantage. Most of them are cosmetic only.

The damages awarded in this case represent the revenue AimJunkies earned from selling cheats for Destiny 2. In the world of copyright lawsuits, $60,000 is a very small award, and doubtless Bungie spent quite a bit more than that in legal fees to prosecute the lawsuit. 

But the purpose of the suit was clearly to prove a point, and establish a basis for suing other cheat providers. And it turns out that Bungie is not afraid of spending legal fees. There is an excellent article in Axios about Bungie’s various legal campaigns. 

The gaming world can be a dangerous place indeed. In addition to other lawsuits about cheating, Bungie has brought suits against player trolls who have made threats to the company’s employees. An article in the New York Post said that one player “allegedly threatened to burn down Bungie headquarters in Seattle. On July 4, 2022, in response to a tweet asking if anyone was willing to commit arson in Seattle in exchange for payment, [the player] replied that he was, and that the poster would receive a discount if the target was Bungie.”

And in a somewhat less disturbing, but also concerning, case, Bungie sued a fan who impersonated Bungie for the purpose of sending a spate of DMCA takedown notices–the kind that content creators send when someone is copying their content on a site like YouTube or TikTok. The notices were directed at fan-created content, but Bungie allows fan content. The fraudulent takedown notices were part of a soap opera of conflict between a disgruntled fan and the company. More info here.

Meanwhile, it’s getting more popular, and easier, to sue the cheat providers. There will probably be more lawsuits to come–from Bungie and others–as they try to shut down this kind of business.

Watch my video here.

On May 9, 2024, an opinion was issued in the case of X v. Bright Data by the US District Court for the Northern District of California, on the topic of copyright preemption. On first blush, this opinion is important for what is says about the limited ability of social media sites to prevent data scraping via their terms of service. But it also provides some interesting commentary on the more general issue of copyright preemption.

In this case, X sued Bright Data based on violation of the X terms of service, which prohibit “Misuse of the Services,” and specifically, “scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose.” Such terms have long been common in online terms of service, and have become even more common after the last year’s rush of machine learning model developers scraping public sites for training data.

The decision was issued by Judge Alsup, who famously ruled for Google on the issue of protectability (or lack thereof) of APIs under copyright law. Based on that opinion alone, if nothing else, Alsup is known for his sophistication about technology issues; he famously learned some Java to opine on that case.

Preemption: State Versus Federal Law

Preemption is a key concept in copyright law. Preemption dictates the interaction between US state law and federal law. Copyright is federal law only; the US Copyright Act of 1976 made this crystal clear under Section 301(a). But it says that legal claims “are not preempted if they fall outside the scope of 301(a)’s express preemption and are not otherwise in conflict with the Act.” Ryan v. Editions Ltd. W., Inc., 786 F.3d 754, 760 (9th Cir. 2015).

The policy reason behind this strong statement of copyright preemption was mainly to prevent individual states from making laws creating their own more restrictive, conflicting versions of copyright law. Copyright law is a balancing act: it allows authors exclusive control of certain activities, like copying and distribution of their works, but that power is balanced against the rights of others to use works of authorship in some ways.

Particularly for works like databases and software, copyright protection has many limitations. In the Oracle v. Google case, all of these doctrines came into play: idea/expression dichotomy, merger, short words and phrases, de minimis–and pivotally, fair use. All these limit the power of the author to control certain uses of their works. More restrictive state law–in the form of contract, unfair competition, and similar theories–threaten to rewrite the balance that federal copyright law represents.

Alsup notes in the decision that there are two clauses to Section 301(a)–scope and conflict. State law claims can survive preemption if they deal with something outside the scope of copyright law, such as overloading servers or use of name and likeness. But the statute also refers to conflict. “Although conflict preemption has played second fiddle to express preemption in the caselaw as of late, it is the more appropriate consideration when … enforcement of state law undermines federal copyright law.” Therefore, even if the state law claim is not within the scope of copyright law, conflict preemption can exist when enforcing the contract would be “an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.” Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council, 530 U.S. 363 (2000), at 373.

Alsup also emphasizes that conflict preemption is particularly important when the contract to be enforced is a standard form contract, as opposed to a contract negotiated between two parties. This kind of one-to-many relationship looks closer to what copyright law was intended to govern, whereas one-to-one contracts allow parties to negotiate a different balance of rights if they desire to do so.

The opinion goes on to list three ways that enforcing a contract prohibiting scraping data would undermine the policy of copyright.

• Copyright empowers copyright owners to exclude others from reproducing, adapting, distributing, and displaying their copyrighted works. But X did not own the copyright to the user-generated content (UGC) on its site; its terms of service, unsurprisingly, only grant X a non-exclusive license. “X Corp.’s state-law claims based on scraping and selling of data would empower X Corp., as a non-exclusive licensee, to exclude others from reproducing, adapting, distributing, and displaying X users’ copyrighted content”—even though X users licensed their copyrighted content to X to make it freely available. Enforcing the contract would take the power to enforce the copyright away from its true owners.
• Similarly, enforcing the contract would interfere with the copyright doctrine of fair use, which grants everyone the right to use copyrightable works in ways that encourage creativity and other policy benefits.
• Last, enforcing the terms would upset the balance of copyright law, which is a “scheme of carefully balanced property rights that give authors and their publishers sufficient inducements to produce and disseminate original creative works and, at the same time, allow others to draw on these works in their own creative and educational activities.” Goldstein on Copyright § 1.14 (3d ed. 2023).

Accordingly, the court ruled that X’s claims under its terms of service were preempted by copyright law, to the extent based on scraping of data.

Sauce for the ML is Sauce for the OSS

This case could have significant implications for the tech world. First, it could create opportunities for those training AI models to scrape content from websites, regardless of contrary prohibitions in the sites’ terms of service. Of course, site operators with treasure troves of data will still have an advantage over scrapers. Even if site owners cannot entirely prevent others from scraping UCG, they can sell preferential access to their APIs. Moreover, the reasoning of the decision might not hold for sites whose content is not primarily UCG.

But second, it could have implications for open source enforcement. For decades, enforcement of open source licenses has been prosecuted under copyright law. The pending SFC v. Vizio case is an attempt to avoid this avenue and bring an action under contract law. In that case, Software Freedom Conservancy brought an action for violation of GPL based on a pure contract theory, seeking specific performance of the contract (i.e. an order to release source code) and not seeking any damages or other copyright remedies. Specific performance is a primarily contract remedy–a rare one at that–and is nearly unheard of under copyright law. The defendant moved to remove the action to federal court based on copyright subject matter and preemption, but lost that battle. The claim was was bounced back to state court, where it currently awaits trial.

The Vizio case, like the X case, is in the 9th Circuit. Like terms of service, open source licenses are one-to-many arrangements, and as in the X case, the plaintiff is not the author. Alsup’s shift of focus to conflict preemption could provide a basis for appeal, or otherwise influence the outcome of that case.

This week, Apple released an SLM (small language model) called OpenELM, which was touted as open source. It did so under a license that got very close to meeting the Open Source Definition–with the caveat that no such official definition exists yet for AI models.

The license says,

Apple grants you a personal, non-exclusive license, under Apple’s copyrights in this original Apple software (the “Apple Software”), to use, reproduce, modify and redistribute the Apple Software, with or without modifications, in source and/or binary forms…

Except as expressly stated in this notice, no other rights or licenses, express or implied, are granted by Apple herein, including but not limited to any patent rights that may be infringed by your derivative works or by other works in which the Apple Software may be incorporated.

So close, and yet, no cigar. The reservation of patent rights in “derivative works” and the grant under “copyrights” apparently seeks to reserve Apple’s ability to sue for patent infringement for use of the model–or perhaps only for changes to the model. But in any case, it doesn’t grant the full rights necessary to be open source.

This is an unfortunate near-miss. It’s not clear that there actually could be any patent rights embodied in or necessary to use the model itself, given the current state of the law in the US, which does not allow patenting of inventions created automatically without human authorship (which probably includes any machine learning model). Also, it seems unlikely that Apple actually intends to sue anyone for patent infringement for using this model, or for modifying it (at least to the extent any inventions were already embodied in the model). So this is probably a case of cautious drafting for an issue that does not really exist.

But at least it’s not RAIL.

I had a great time talking to Ben Rometsch about open source business strategy. Check out the podcast here.

I had a great discussion recently with Greg Shepard:

The Business of Open-Source: A Conversation with Heather Meeker (Part One)

The Business of Open-Source: A Conversation with Heather Meeker (Part Two)

On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violated the GPL, ordering Orange to pay €500,000 in compensatory damages and €150,000 for moral damages.

This case has been ongoing for many years.

Entr’ouvert is the publisher of Lasso, a reference library for the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol, an open standard for identity providers to authenticate users and pass authentication tokens to online services. This is the open protocol that enables single sign-on (SSO). The Lasso product is dual licensed by Entr’Ouvert under GPL or commercial licenses.

In 2005, Orange won a contract with the French Agency for the Development of Electronic Administration to develop parts of the service-public.fr portal, which allows users to interact online with the government for administrative procedures. Orange used the Lasso software in the solution, but did not pass on the rights to its modifications free of charge under GPL, or make the source code to its modifications available.

Entr’Ouvert sued Orange in 2010, and the case wended its way through the courts, turning on, among other things, issues of proof of Entr’Ouvert ‘s copyright interest in the software, and whether the case properly sounded in breach of contract or copyright infringement.

On March 19, 2021, the Appeals Court first rejected Entr’Ouvert’s claims for copyright infringement, saying that the case was a breach of contract claim. The Court of Cassation, which is the supreme court of France, reviewed the case and issued an order on October 5, 2022 overturning the decision of the Court of Appeal. The case was then remanded to the Court of Appeal, which issued its order this week.

The compensatory damages were based on both lost profits of the plaintiff and disgorgement of profits of Orange. Moral damages compensate the plaintiff for harm to reputation or other non-monetary injury.

Note: I patched this information together from various articles, mostly read in translation. The dates in the lawsuit process were inconsistent in those sources. If I find any errors, I will update this post.

Update 2/22/24: Here is the decision in French.