[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.
>
>
>
>
>
>       Win a MacBook Air or iPod touch with Yahoo!7. 
> http://au.docs.yahoo.com/homepageset
> _______________________________________________
> cc-community mailing list
> cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-community
>
>
It takes 20 years of hard work to become an overnight success."
--Diana Rankin,
  writer and public speaker



More information about the cc-community mailing list