Assume the following hypothetical situation: You discover a blatant GPL infringement in a piece of software. Blatant such that the programmers were so careless and lazy they made nearly no attempts to cover their tracks. However, the offenders are located in a country that is known to be hostile to matters of intellectual property. Is trying to enforce the GPL in such a situation basically impossible?
If you want a comprehensive answer, you probably would want to do define what "the west" is. I'll go with "Europe and the USA" in my answer.<p>No. "The West" is the worlds largest economic region. Any company not complying to the conditions of the GPL is toying with being excluded from western markets and that's a huge risk to profits. Mostly companies get away with it because nobody notices. But as soon as a GLP violation is detected, many legal (and extra-legal) paths are open to discourage the culprit.
No. For example Naomi Wu successfully got source code from Umidigi in China, by showing up in their offices while doing a livestream on YouTube.<p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/aug/24/naomi-wu-request-for-source/" rel="nofollow">https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/aug/24/naomi-wu-request-...</a><p>So you just need to think outside the box and do actions that don't necessarily involve lawyers or use Western thinking.