The Biggest Legal Danger For Open Source? 161
itwbennett writes "Brian Proffitt is blogging about the undercurrent of legal issues troubling the open source world these days and offers up this question: Are patents or copyright a bigger threat to the open source community? Patents are the obvious choice, with inflicting fear being the 'obvious intention of those who have instigated the various legal troubles on open source practitioners.' But the issue of copyright and copyright assignments is no less troublesome, argues Proffitt. And copyright assignment can be confusingly Machievllian, even in open source land."
Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly - copyleft is simply a (rather oddly named) type of license for copyrighted material. If you want to go all the way with open source by relinquishing copyright and releasing it to the public domain, you're giving up all rights on setting terms on how your code should be used.
Copyrights are not bad things. Companies lobbying for infinite copyright length *cough*disney*cough* so that they can sit around and profit from decades-old content and not innovate or even produce new material are bad things. Never mind the whole cultural contribution aspect of copyright expiration.
At least patents expire - although in software years they might as well go on forever. That's my biggest beef with (non-obvious) software patents in particular - the length of a patent term does not correspond with the useful lifetime of the product or its industry.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
end of discussion. No more comments are needed.
Not quite.
Malevolent organisations which don't respect community commons are the threat. Patents are just one of their tools.
Until those organisations are reigned in, they will continue inventing ways to diminish the value of projects which threaten their income.
*DRM* and patents, not copyright and patents (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM and signed hardware is the biggest legal threat beside patents.
If we liberate the PC, only to find that people are doing their computing on handheld computers (such as phones) and games consoles which won't boot if the software's not approved, then we'll be shafted.
The answer is (as it always was) that we have to educate people about what sovereignty/liberty/independence means for computing, and that having freedom is valuable. That takes years (ask RMS), but it's the only way to win successive battles. There's no point in defeating some current problem if the same attack will succeed later under a different guise.
After DRM and patents, the big problem is centralised social networking, where people do their computing on remote servers which they have no control over.
Copyrights are not as big a deal as patents. (Score:4, Insightful)
With copyrights, you can write around the infringing part et voila, you no longer infringe. You can do this a lot easier than writing around a patented algorithm which may lay at the core of your software.
SCO brought up many busted hypotheses why Linux infringed on SCO IP, up to and including "negative knowledge" - i.e., "don't do it that way". None of it stuck. "Similarity" is not enough. Header files are not enough. Some evidence of word-for-word copying in the source code must be there for the accusation of copyright infringement to stick at all. And even then, it's proportional to the amount of infringement. And *even then* courts want you to hammer it out privately before ever going to trial. Courts frown upon plaintiffs going to court without letting the defendant try to mitigate what might be wrong.
And to this day, they have still not shown any copied code from Unix in Linux, on their path to their "utter destruction" as Darl McBride so succinctly put it. And Linux has come out only stronger because of the ordeal while SCO's entire market cap is 2.1 million on the pink sheets.
http://www.smallcapdirectory.com/Listing.aspx?CompanyId=21987&Mode=Profile [smallcapdirectory.com]
Apple sued Microsoft over UI for "copyright" and lost - just because it looks similar doesn't mean it's the *same*.
Patents are more difficult to defend against. Because these days, patents cover ideas and general mock-ups (design patents) with no regard for prior art or obviousness in the eyes of someone skilled in the art. That last bit has especially been removed from the "obviousness" test. It seems like patent examiners lowered the bar to "Dumb and Dumberer" for obviousness.
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BMO