As p4bl0 pointed out though, if your license isn't being violated then you have no claim here, they're obeying the law and your takedowns are not valid.
The regular license allows the use of the purchased item in a project for either
personal or commercial uses, without the payment of any further fees or charges
after the initial download cost.
The regular license gives you the right to use the purchased items within 1
project of your own or on behalf of a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit).
You or your client cannot offer the item up for resale either on its own or as part
of a project.
Items purchased under a regular license must not be redistributed or resold “as-
is” or as part of any other collection of files.
What you can do:
You can integrate the component in 1 APP.
You can be distribute it only as a binary only (You cannot distribute Source Code).
Commercial use is allowed.
You can customize the Source Code.
I think (and actually, I hope too) that this isn't: "You cannot distribute Source Code". The BSD license may not force you to redistribute the source code, but I don't see it allowing you to forbid such a thing. Am I wrong?
EDIT: It seems I am, since if there was any changes to the product, it can be freely relicensed.
The safest way to protect against this is to use a better free software license which is copyleft (for instance the GNU GPL).
There is nothing in the BSD license that doesn't allow you to add additional restriction with respect to distribution. IANAL, but there are still two manners in which there could be a violation:
- The BSD license requires one to preserve the copyright notices and the BSD license. If that person stripped these from the software, he would be in violation of the BSD license.
- If the seller did not add anything that is copyrightable, I guess it's questionable if his added terms hold up. In this case it is exactly the same as the original BSD-licensed product, and covered by the BSD license.
What usually happens is that some proprietary software vendor takes a chunk of BSD-licensed software (say, a TCP/IP stack) and integrates it into their proprietary software (say, a kernel). In that case, you'd theoretically be allowed to pry out the BSD-licensed parts and redistribute it. In practice, this will be impossible, since the original source files are probably changed to such an extend that it's a mixture of BSD-licensed and proprietary software.
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Of course, this is all the effect of choosing a weak copyleft license. You are practically saying 'you can do whatever you want with this code, as long as you list my name and this license in the source code and/or binary versions, and don't sue my if it doesn't work correctly'. If you want stronger protection, you should use a strong copyleft or a proprietary license.
Maybe you should too. The BSD license only requires reproduction of the copyright and license terms in (1) the source code; or (2) in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the a binary distribution.
You don't have to state the use of (revised) BSD-licensed code outside the source or binary distribution.
If he has modified even a single line of your source code, he is free to re-license the entire product as a whole under his own license. As long as your name / copyright notice is preserved in the source code / binary, there is nothing illegal about this. How else do you think GPL projects incorporate BSD-code ?
