The Legality of Free and Open Source Software Licences: The Case of Jacobsen v. Katzer

In August 2008 one of, if not the most, influential Intellectual Property courts in the USA known as the Court of Appeals for Federal Circuit upheld the validity of a free and open source software licence known as the Artistic Licence. The case is significant because up until this point there has been little judicial discussion of the legal operation of this new type of copyright licensing that is sweeping across the world fuelled by the ubiquity of the Internet. The decision in Robert Jacobsen v. Matthew Katzer and Kamind Associates, Inc. 2008 U.S. App. LEXIS 17161 (Fed. Cir. 2008) issued on 13 August 2008 provides a unique and welcomed insight into the legal operation of free and open source software licences and by analogy Creative Commons styled open content licences. This article analyses the judgment and provides commentary on its reasoning

Free and open-source software

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Comparative analysis of copyright assignment and licence formalities for Open Source Contributor Agreements

This article discusses formal requirements in open source software contributor copyright assignment and licensing agreements. Contributor agreements are contracts by which software developers transfer or license their work on behalf of an open source project. This is done for convenience and enforcement purposes, and usually takes the form of a formal contract. This work conducts a comparative analysis of how several jurisdicitons regard those agreements. We specifically look at the formal requirements across those countries to ascertain whether formalities are constitutive or probative. We then look at the consequences of the lack of formalities for the validity of those contributor agreements

Free-libre open source software as a public policy choice

Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is characterised by a specific programming and development paradigm. The availability and freedom of use of source code are at the core of this paradigm, and are the prerequisites for FLOSS features. Unfortunately, the fundamental role of code is often ignored among those who decide the software purchases for Canadian public agencies. Source code availability and the connected freedoms are often seen as unrelated and accidental aspects, and the only real advantage acknowledged, which is the absence of royalty fees, becomes paramount. In this paper we discuss some relevant legal issues and explain why public administrations should choose FLOSS for their technological infrastructure. We also present the results of a survey regarding the penetration and awareness of FLOSS usage into the Government of Canada. The data demonstrates that the Government of Canada shows no enforced policy regarding the implementation of a specific technological framework (which has legal, economic, business, and ethical repercussions) in their departments and agencies

Stack Overflow: A Code Laundering Platform?

Developers use Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to exchange knowledge and expertise. Stack Overflow is a popular Q&A website where developers discuss coding problems and share code examples. Although all Stack Overflow posts are free to access, code examples on Stack Overflow are governed by the Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license that developers should obey when reusing code from Stack Overflow or posting code to Stack Overflow. In this paper, we conduct a case study with 399 Android apps, to investigate whether developers respect license terms when reusing code from Stack Overflow posts (and the other way around). We found 232 code snippets in 62 Android apps from our dataset that were potentially reused from Stack Overflow, and 1,226 Stack Overflow posts containing code examples that are clones of code released in 68 Android apps, suggesting that developers may have copied the code of these apps to answer Stack Overflow questions. We investigated the licenses of these pieces of code and observed 1,279 cases of potential license violations (related to code posting to Stack overflow or code reuse from Stack overflow). This paper aims to raise the awareness of the software engineering community about potential unethical code reuse activities taking place on Q&A websites like Stack Overflow.Comment: In proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER

Credit Where It’s Due: The Law and Norms of Attribution

The reputation we develop by receiving credit for the work we do proves to the world the nature of our human capital. If professional reputation were property, it would be the most valuable property that most people own because much human capital is difficult to measure. Although attribution is ubiquitous and important, it is largely unregulated by law. In the absence of law, economic sectors that value attribution have devised non-property regimes founded on social norms to acknowledge and reward employee effort and to attribute responsibility for the success or failure of products and projects. Extant contract-based and norms-based attribution regimes fail optimally to protect attribution interests. This article proposes a new approach to employment contracts designed to shore up the desirable characteristics of existing norms-based attribution systems while allowing legal intervention in cases of market failure. The right to public attribution would be waivable upon proof of a procedurally fair negotiation. The right to attribution necessary to build human capital, however, would be inalienable. Unlike an intellectual property right, attribution rights would not be enforced by restricting access to the misattributed work itself; the only remedy would be for the lost value of human capital. The variation in attribution norms that currently exists in different workplace cultures can and should be preserved through the proposed contract approach. The proposal strikes an appropriate balance between expansive and narrow legal protections for workplace knowledge and, in that respect, addresses one of the most vexing current debates at the intersection of intellectual property and employment law