Bad reporting from The Register. There's nothing historical, or even all that interesting, about it as it was a default judgement because the defendant did not even show up.
After plaintiff sued, defendant filed an answer and made initial disclosures. Defendant that stopped responding to the court, and told plaintiff that they would not be defending the action. Defendant then failed to appear for a pre-motion conference. Defendant's law firm them submitted a motion asking to withdraw from the case.
Plaintiffs asked for and received a default judgement. In a default judgement that court assumes that the plaintiffs allegations are all true, and rules accordingly. GPL isn't even really relevant at that point--all that matters is that plaintiffs allege they own the copyrighted works and that defendant does not have a valid license to use them.
Also, the defendant is going through a form of bankruptcy. Kind of hard to dedicate a bunch of resources to defense (or compliance) when there are no resources left at all.
Which makes this a particularly bad piece from the register, since their opening lines are
"The Software Freedom Conservancy has secured $90,000 in damages for willful infringement of GPLv2, plus nearly $50,000 in costs from Westinghouse Digital Electronics over its illegal distribution of the Unix utility BusyBox. The company has also been ordered to stop shipping product loaded with BusyBox."
When it's just about 100% sure that those awards will never be realised.
"The company's costs could have been lower, but the New-York district court hearing the case took a dim view of the fact that Westinghouse's legal team failed to appear for the discovery phase. .... Westinghouse is currently in General Assignment, an alternative to bankruptcy under California state law, and declined to defend itself."
After plaintiff sued, defendant filed an answer and made initial disclosures. Defendant that stopped responding to the court, and told plaintiff that they would not be defending the action. Defendant then failed to appear for a pre-motion conference. Defendant's law firm them submitted a motion asking to withdraw from the case.
Plaintiffs asked for and received a default judgement. In a default judgement that court assumes that the plaintiffs allegations are all true, and rules accordingly. GPL isn't even really relevant at that point--all that matters is that plaintiffs allege they own the copyrighted works and that defendant does not have a valid license to use them.