An attorney for the developers behind Ruby on the Rails, the open source web framework, said the company plans to appeal an arrest warrant issued against them for “criminal copyright infringement.”
The arrest warrant, issued Monday by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that the company “used the Internet to commit copyright infringement through its own development of the Ruby programming language and services, including the production and distribution of Ruby code that was used to develop Ruby on Ruby.”
In the warrant, the attorney, Michael J. Sargent, said his client plans to fight the warrant and to contest the charge of “commercial copyright infringement” in the courts.
“The company has the legal right to be heard,” Sargend wrote in an email to the AP.
“It should not have to wait for the government to go to court to protect its intellectual property.”
In an interview with the AP, Ruby developer Paul Hsieh said he’s been surprised by the warrant.
“I’m surprised.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it,” he said.
“What happened was that the U
