An Open Source Legal Breakthrough 292
jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.' The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."
This is the first I have heard of this case (Score:5, Interesting)
That is a TRULY balzy thing to do -- use open source, patent it and send bills for payment to the original author for patent infringement.
This is a wilful abuse of all sorts of systems... the patent system, copyright and the legal system. A person like that needs to be billed for all the time he wasted in the government and then barred from participating the in owning patents or copyrights.
Re:Finally! (Score:1, Interesting)
It isn't about the train-controlling software guy being protected that's good, it's the fact that it's setting a precedent for other software authors to be protected against the same bullshit. I doubt anyone would try to pull this with the Linux kernel but it will discourage businesses from trying to take open-source and fold it back into a closed-source app.
Re:I don't see a decision... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe I'm just missing something but I don't see a decision. The preliminary ruling states that it's going to Dismiss in part, but not in whole the case. However, it's missing key details, like will the plaintiff need to open his source code, will there be damages paid to the defendant due to the costs and burdens placed on him to defend a false complaint?
The appeals court cannot itself make decisions; but it can write down what decisions the lower court should make and why and send it back to the lower court. And the lower court better follow that friendly advice or else...
In this case the friendly advice of the appeals court is that taking code that is under an Open Source license, and redistributing it without following the terms of the license, is copyright infringement. And we recently learnt that the penalty for illegally copying 24 songs, each worth about $0.99, carries a penalty of $220,000. So I'd say that Mr. Jacobson has this pleasant Mr. Katzer firmly by the balls. Mr. Katzer is under no obligation to open his source code although only that might allow him to legally sell his software in the future; it won't fix any past copyright infringement. And this is obviously a case where in Mr. Jacobson's place I would go and try to inflict maximum damage.
Re:I'm trusting the summary this time (Score:5, Interesting)
That court has lost its way, and the appellate court's decision doesn't really correct it (though it certainly helps Jacobsen's case).
Copyright law is meant "to promote the progress of the arts and .. sciences." Anyone who looks at it in economic terms only, ignores an entire spectrum of human motivation, of which economic advantage, while important, is merely a part.
People sure as hell don't acquire things (e.g. train control software) for economic reasons ("ooh, my model train is now more efficient; I can finally crush my play-freight-delivering competitors!"), so why would economic reasons be the only motivation for producing things? It's absurd. It's also something any amateur programmer -- no, actually, any hobbyist in any field whatsoever -- would trivially understand.
Re:Open source people are greedy too. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm trusting the summary this time (Score:4, Interesting)
That court has lost its way, and the appellate court's decision doesn't really correct it (though it certainly helps Jacobsen's case).
Copyright law is meant "to promote the progress of the arts and .. sciences." Anyone who looks at it in economic terms only, ignores an entire spectrum of human motivation, of which economic advantage, while important, is merely a part.
People sure as hell don't acquire things (e.g. train control software) for economic reasons ("ooh, my model train is now more efficient; I can finally crush my play-freight-delivering competitors!"), so why would economic reasons be the only motivation for producing things? It's absurd. It's also something any amateur programmer -- no, actually, any hobbyist in any field whatsoever -- would trivially understand.
I think you are confusing economic reasons with financial reasons - which are, as you stated, a part of, but not all, of the economic reasons why someone may do somethings.
Economics looks at why people do things and what benefits they gain from them; and tries to explain the links between the two. It would be pretty dismal indeed if all it looked at were financial causes; in fact some of the best economic research is around behavioral actions that result in non-financial outcomes.
2 incompetent lawyers (Score:2, Interesting)
For all those who are consfused on the issue, because I was, the issue the defendent is trying to defend is that there is an economic interest for the plaintiff (because copyright law doesn't cover moral/philisophical issues). The issue the defendent was trying to defend was that the open source licence (presumably GNU... they never say) doesn't hold because the terms are "covenants", not "conditions" because the plaintiff SOMEHOW (though never stated properly) doesn't reserve any rights...
The defendent's lawyer FINALLY answers their question at the very end with this (and there are no typos in my transcript)... "...if you look under california law a condition is 'an event not certain to occur which mutscht occur uhh before performance under the contract becomes due' now under that definition, these are not conditions".... WOW.
Mostly a good opinion (Score:3, Interesting)