OpenSourceLegal.org

According to reports, Thomson Reuters, the owned of the EndNote software product, has sued an open source development project competing with EndNote.  The competing product, known as Zotero, is being developed by an open source community hosted at George Mason University.  The complaint alleges that the project members reverse engineered the EndNote citation file format in violation of EndNote’s end user license agreement.

This could become an important open source/licensing case.  Resolution of the issues raised could result either in stopping open source developments of competitive products or holding “no reverse engineering” clauses unenforceable, either of which would cause a lot of chaos in the software community.

Cases can end up be resolved on other grounds.  For example, because the case takes place at a state university, the court might dismiss it on grounds of sovereign immunity — see for example, this article discussing a case in California (Marketing Information Masters v. The Trustees of the California State University) which held that state universities and employees were immune from claims for copyright infringement.

In a case originating from Northern California (Jacobsen v. Katzer), the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that the Artistic License, a type of open source license, contains enforceable terms. This is a potentially significant case for the open source community as it is one of the first clear holdings by a court that supports the use and enforceability of open source licensing.

According to news reports, IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corporation sued Red Hat and Novell on patents related to the Linux user interface. The complaint can be found here.

According to one analysis of the SCO-IBM hearing earlier in March, evidence presented by SCO adds up to a total of 326 lines of code found exclusively in header files and similar items.

Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org) has apparently won another court action in Germany, this time against D-Link for use of Linux in a network attached storage device. An english translation is available here.

In case you missed it, there is another case involving the GPL perculating through the legal system: IChessU vs. Jin.This is a case in Israel that commenced in late 2006 and relates to a chess program that was published under the GPL, and allegedly incorporated into a product not released under the GPL. Details about it (posted from the plaintiff’s perspective) can be found here.

According to an article in newsforge.com, a customer (Auto/Mate) is suing a developer (Webswell) in federal court in the Northern District of New York for incorporating open source software in a project which was supposed to be owned by the customer. The case is apparently being settled.

According to the Free Software Foundation website, a lawsuit alleging that the use of the GNU GPL constituted a restraint of trade (i.e. antitrust violations) has been dismissed.

In what appears to be a tactical maneuver, IBM drops four patent claims against SCO.

According to various news articles, including this CNET article, the judge in the SCO-IBM “voiced loud skepticism about SCO’s case”, although it did not grant IBM’s request to end the case.