During the August Congressional recess, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its long-awaited study on Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs), required under the…
Open source software licenses and copyright law have a complex relationship. People often say that open source turns copyright on its head and loosely refer to open source…
The open source license you choose for your project, or for the projects you choose to contribute to, can have significant effects on how what you contribute is used. One…
It's Spring 2003. I'm the Red Hat general counsel. Total Red Hat revenues the prior year were less than $100 million. Red Hat's loss on continuing operations was $17 million…
This is the first in a series exploring the things I have learned from the open source way during my time at Red Hat. About 9 years ago I joined Red Hat and my life changed…
The Hargreaves Report issued last month has some thought-provoking things to say about the problems of software patents, lengthy copyright terms, and other intellectual…
Some time ago, at the very beginning of opensource.com, I wrote a post on the possibility of using some archaic forms of law – champerty, barratry and maintenance – against…
This story was written and originally posted by Kaitlin Mara at Intellectual Property Watch. Copyright is critical to the survival of the music industry and its creators, but…
"Patents are here to stay." This is the sort of statement that makes me uneasy. I guess in the 17th century the common wisdom was "slavery is here to stay." In the 18th…
The year 2012 had many important FOSS legal developments which reflects the continued increase in FOSS use. FOSS projects have increased from 600,000 in 2010 to 900,000 by…
I’ve recently been involved in several discussions that are variations on, "Which open source or free software license should I choose for my project?" Here is my way of…
Modern copyright law grants copyright automatically to any creative work, including simple things like blog posts – and small pieces of code on github. This default copyright…