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."
Renegging on the GPL (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, patents are the biggest threat, but here's another.
Suppose Larry decides he's not happy with just changing the license on one of the dozens of open source products he's acquired and decides to actually start demanding payment for use of earlier versions of the software.. Does a copyright owner have the legal right to retract an issued license? Does that right apply to the GPL? This is a massive blindspot in copyright law.
Re:Patents (Score:3, Interesting)
nor have they stopped contributing to culture.
Me thinks you have never seen an episode of Hannah Montana.
Re:Patents (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
I wonder.
The Disney archives are essentially intact -
down to the fragile matte paintings on glass used in films like Bambi.
Amazon.com lists over 3,600 live action and animated titles distributed by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. Most are quite reasonably priced.
Print quality is uniformly excellent and restoration is not dependent on scratching and clawing out funds from a dozen foundation grants.
Preservation does not happen unless there is there is the will and the money to make it happen.
Re:Patents (Score:2, Interesting)
You're effectively arguing: "Patents don't kill open source, people do".
This statement is true in the same way as the guns-related one, and it detracts from the discussion at hand in the same way the guns-related one does.
A decent illustration of how this is irrelevant and counterproductive here http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-gunskill.htm [huppi.com] and I'm sure the /. readership has no problems translating this example to the open source domain.