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Why are vendors waiting for the SFLC lawsuit?

Why wait for the lawsuit to be filed before taking appropriate action, or at least responding to the SFLC? Is it that any publicity is good publicity? After all the suits of the last year do vendors still think the SFLC is bluffing?
Written by Dana Blankenhorn, Inactive

Another day, another Busybox lawsuit.

This time it's Extreme Networks, a maker of enterprise-class switching gear, which apparently ignored repeated requests to talk and drew legal papers.

Past suits over violations of the GPL by a variety of vendors all had the same conclusion. The vendors noticed their failure after the filing and quickly settled.

So the question needs to be asked. Why?

Why wait for the lawsuit to be filed before taking appropriate action, or at least responding to the SFLC? Is it that any publicity is good publicity? After all the suits of the last year do vendors still think the SFLC is bluffing?

It costs money to settle any lawsuit, and as the settlements pile up and the grievance becomes increasingly obvious one would think that toll would go up.

That's how the movie and the music people have played it. In each set of lawsuits they seek greater and greater penalties, and courts are increasingly willing to put the hammer down. On grandmas and other apparently innocent infringers.

But these are corporations, many of them big corporations, which are ignoring requests to settle and deliberately waiting for the lawsuit.

Shouldn't Extreme pay a more extreme penalty, then?

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