OpenSourceLegal.org

According to Information Week, Diebold is using GPL software in its voting machines in violation of the license terms.

In what could be a potentially far-reaching case (if not eventually overturned by the Supreme Court), on October 30, 2008, the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has issued an opinion in In re Bilski which denies patent coverage to an invention implementing a method of hedging risk in the field of commodities trading.  It specifically rejects part of the analysis used under the State Street Bank case which was the basis of the modern (i.e. post-1998) boom in software patent filings.

The Bilski case upholds the patent office’s rejection of an invention as patentable; it was not decided in the context of the assertion of a patent against an alleged infringer.  However, the basics principles in the case would seem also to be applicable to issued patents.

The full impact of the case needs to be considered — it is not in itself a rejection of the possibility of software having patent protection, but instead a very significant restriction on the kinds of software that can be protected by patents in the United States.  Patent protection for software in the EU has (since rejection of legislation on the subject in 2005) been subject to greater limitations than in the United States.

This case has obvious implications for the open source software movement, as the possibility of patent problems with open source software has been a cause of uncertainty in many situations.

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.

A Dutch engineer has published a manual detailing how to find open source license violations.

Cnet published an article describing projects under Microsoft’s CodePlex, a site Microsoft has set up to host projects it calls open source.  The article reviews Microsoft’s different source code licenses and the speculates on the reasons why Microsoft releases code under the Windows-only Microsoft Limited Permissive License or open source Microsoft Public License.

See also “Microsoft taints open source CodePlex well” on theregister.co.uk.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth wants to think so, he has reportedly set a goal: “our goal, very simply, is to make sure the Free software ecosystem can deliver a Mac OS-like experience, or an experience that will compete with the Mac OS. . . So Canonical will in fact launch an effort to try and spearhead that. And over a period of 2 years, really move the dial forward on the desktop experience.”

Here’s an interesting blog post on the method that Apache uses to govern its development process.

A short article on considerations in merger and acquisition situations can be found here.

A reminder that computer code used in open source projects can have several intellectual property rights associated with it: copyright (licensed under open source licenses), trade secrets (exposed by the source code and thus use not restricted), patents (usually licensed under open source licenses, if even relevant) and, finally, trademark — actually a reasonably powerful method of keeping control of open source projects. See this article at CNET News.com.