[cc-community] Washington Federal Court confirms that free licences are enforceable
Jim Baker
frstprin at mninter.net
Sat Aug 16 10:27:28 EDT 2008
Please add detail. It's not clear to me how this is a victory for the
open source movement. Say I produce an open source software app that I
release under GPL. If a commercial publisher picks it up, how are his
rights changed under this court decision—and what actually are his
rights and obligations?
Thanks,
Jim
On Aug 15, 2008, at 11:39 PM, Carl Antuar wrote:
> Hi, all.
>
> Looks like the Federal Appeals Court in Washington has confirmed that
> a licence can validly be 'free as in speech, not as in beer'. The
> Association for Computing Machinery included this article in their
> recent TechNews newsletter:
>
>
> Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software
> New York Times (08/14/08) P. C7; Markoff, John
>
> In a major victory for the open source software movement, the federal
> appeals court in Washington, D.C., has ruled that simply because a
> software programmer may give his work away for free does not mean that
> the software cannot be protected. The decision legitimizes the use of
> commercial contracts for the distribution of computer software and
> digital artistic works for the public good. The ruling also boosts the
> open source movement by easing the concerns of large organizations
> about relying on free software from developers who contributed to the
> effort without pay. The ruling will also have implications for the
> Creative Common license, which is used by organizations such as
> Wikipedia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for
> distributing courseware and other materials. Creative Commons CEO
> Joichi Ito says the ambiguity facing open source licensing has been
> one of the obstacles hindering the movement. The appeals court
> decision reversed a San
> Francisco federal court ruling over the misappropriation of a
> software program by Kam Industries, a company that publishes model
> train hobbyist software. Kam Industries owner Matthew A. Katzer had
> sued free software developers for patent infringement while the free
> software community argued that Katzer failed to disclose earlier
> technology, or prior art, in his patent filings. In March 2006,
> University of California, Berkeley professor Robert G. Jacobsen filed
> a lawsuit against Katzer claiming that his company was distributing a
> commercial software program that used code from the Java Model
> Railroad Interface project, and was redistributing the program without
> the credits required as part of the open source license it was
> originally distributed under. The lower court ruled that the terms of
> the open source contract were overly broad.
>
>
>
>
>
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