Where: Columbia Law School

When: October 31, 2014 9:00am to 5:00pm

Who: Ian Sullivan, Eben Moglen, Mishi Choudhary, Clint Adams, Software Freedom Law Center

FOSS Law: Where We Are, Where We Are Going

As we begin our second decade of working as counselors and advocates for software freedom, SFLC invites counsel, developers, enterprise users and other members of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities to join us at a free conference exploring legal issues surrounding FOSS, present and future, held at Columbia Law School on Friday, October 31, 2014.

Martin Fink, CTO of Hewlett-Packard, will offer a keynote address on “Free Software and the Machine.” Professor Eben Moglen, SFLC’s founder and Executive Director, will speak on “Software Freedom in the Age of ‘Cloud to Mobile’: The Next Ten Years.” SFLC Legal Director Mishi Choudhary and her team will discuss current issues in patent law, copyleft compliance, and the ongoing challenge to tax-exempt non-profit organization for FOSS communities. We will consider technical as well as legal changes—including memristor-based computing, disposable computers, and the economics of cloud architectures—that will have profound effects on FOSS and its legal arrangements in the decade to come.

For ten years, SFLC has been the intellectual and professional leader in FOSS legal practice around the world. If you want to know what the next ten years of legal evolution in FOSS are going to be about, join us at a meeting no one will want to have missed.

The conference will take place at Columbia Law School, 435 west 116th Street, NYC, on October 31, 2014 from 9am to 5pm. No registration is required and attendance is free but if room occupancy limits are reached preference will go to those who have pre-registered. To pre-register please send an email with your name and any company or project affiliation you choose to share to rsvp@softwarefreedom.org. NYS Bar members who attend will be eligible for free CLE credit and must either register beforehand with Columbia Law School or make use of on-site registration at 9:00am.

Conference Schedule

09:00-09:30 CLE registration + Coffee and Tea

09:35-09:50 Opening remarks
- Eben Moglen

09:50-10:40 “FOSS and the Machine”
- Martin Fink

10:45-11:35 Organizing FOSS entities
Mishi Choudhary moderating:
- JD Bean
- Bdale Garbee
- Karen Sandler
- Aaron Wiliamson

11:40-12:30 “Software Freedom in the Age of ‘Cloud to Mobile’: The Next Ten Years.”
- Eben Moglen

12:30-13:30 Lunch (Provided)

13:30-14:20 Patents and Free Software
Eben Moglen moderating:
- Keith Bergelt
- Justin Colannino
- Leonardo Renna
- Stefano Zacchiroli

14:25-15:25 Technology in practice
- Clint Adams and Ian Sullivan “Technology of a law practice”
- Clint Adams “The distribution and the cloud”
- Ian Sullivan “Disposable computing”

15:25-15:40 Break

15:40-16:00 FOSS and Export regulations
- Marc Jones

16:00-16:50 Compliance presentation and QA
- Eben Moglen
- Mishi Choudhary

16:50-17:00 Concluding remarks
- Eben Moglen

Speaker Biographies

Eben Moglen is Executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center and Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School. Professor Moglen has represented many of the world’s leading free software developers. Professor Moglen earned his PhD in History and law degree at Yale University during what he sometimes calls his “long, dark period” in New Haven. After law school he clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the United States District Court in New York City and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught at Columbia Law School since 1987 and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Virginia. In 2003 he was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for efforts on behalf of freedom in the electronic society. Professor Moglen is admitted to practice in the State of New York and before the United States Supreme Court.

Mishi Choudhary is the Legal Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Prior to joining SFLC, Mishi Choudhary was a litigator with areas of practice covering corporate and commercial Law with special emphasis on Information Technology Law, trademarks, copyrights and patents. Mishi is the founding director of SFLC.in based in New Delhi. She has an LLM degree from Columbia Law School, an LLB degree from Faculty of law, University of Delhi, and a Bachelors Honors degree in political science from Hindu College, University of Delhi, India. Mishi is a member of the Bar Council of Delhi, licensed to appear before the Supreme Court of India, all the State High Courts in India, in the State of New York, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and before the Southern District of New York.

Martin Fink is HP CTO, Director of HP Labs and General Manager of HP’s Network Function Virtualization (NFV) group. Fink’s research team at HP Labs, the company’s exploratory and advanced research group, is responsible for anticipating IT trends to address the complex issues that will face HP customers and society over the next decades. During his career at HP, Fink has worked in a wide range of roles. Most recently, Fink drove the strategy and execution of HP’s Cloud business, launching the HP Helion portfolio of products and services, designed to help the industry transition to cloud-based provider and consumption models. As head of the NonStop Enterprise Division, Fink was responsible for the development, delivery, and marketing of the HP Integrity NonStop family of servers, database, and middleware software and solutions. He oversaw the Atalla Security Products line of network security processors for banking, Internet, and enterprise applications. Finally, he led the overall open source and Linux strategy across HP, helping the company gain external market leadership in Linux.

Clint Adams is Chief Technology Officer at the Software Freedom Law Center. Clint joined the SFLC in 2010 after a variety of odd jobs. He holds a bachelor’s in Intercultural Studies, and over 17 years of experience developing Free Software. He loves Debian, GNU, and Haskell. Clint is the upstream maintainer of hOpenPGP, openpgp-asciiarmor, hopenpgp-tools, debianutils, fakeroot, libmsv, zomg, posh, Haskell libraries for SANE, WebDAV, MusicBrainz, and other software, as well as an infrequent upstream contributor to GNU FM and libre.fm, zsh, and other such things. He is obsessed with food.

Jonathan D. Bean (J.D.) is Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center. J.D. holds a Juris Doctor from New York University School of Law where he was the Senior Articles Editor of the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty. He also has a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Political Science from The George Washington University where he graduated magna cum laude. Prior to serving as Counsel for the Software Freedom Law Center, he spent the summer of 2011 as a Legal Intern at SFLC joining the organization in 2012 as an Attorney Fellow. J.D. is admitted to practice in the State of New York.

Keith Bergelt is the chief executive officer of Open Invention Network (OIN), the collaborative enterprise that enables innovation in open source and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux. Prior to joining the OIN, Mr. Bergelt served as president and CEO of two intellectual property Hedge Funds – Paradox Capital and IPI. Mr. Bergelt has served as a senior advisor to the technology investment division at Texas Pacific Group. He was a General Manager of the Strategic Intellectual Asset Management business unit at Motorola Corporation and served as Motorola’s director of Technology Strategy. Prior to his extensive private sector experience, Mr. Bergelt served for twelve years as a diplomat with postings at the United Nations in NYC and the American Embassy in Tokyo, Japan.

Justin C. Colannino focuses his practice on free and open source software, patent law, and patent litigation. As Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center he advised non-profit free and open source projects in all areas of free and open source development. Justin is also an experienced patent litigator, having worked as an associate at a major international law firm, and as a law clerk in the District of New Jersey. As of November, 2014 Justin will be associated with Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C. in Boston, Massachusetts.

Bdale Garbee drives open source strategy and advocacy within the company as an HP Fellow in the CTO Office. Most recently, he was HP Chief Technologist for Open Source and Linux. He took early retirement in 2012 and served briefly as Senior Open Source Adviser to Samsung before returning to HP in 2014. Garbee has been a Debian developer since the earliest days of the project, serving as Debian Project Leader (DPL) from 2002-2003. He currently serves as Chairman of the Debian Technical Committee. Garbee is president of Software in the Public Interest, represents the interests of individual members and developers on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation, and serves on the board of the Freedombox Foundation.

Marc Jones is Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center. Marc graduated summa cum laude with a Juris Doctor (JD) from Quinnipiac University School of Law where he was the Research and Symposium Editor of the Quinnipiac Law Review. Marc also has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University Connecticut. Prior to joining SFLC as Counsel, he was an Attorney Fellow at SFLC. Before graduating from law school, he had acquired over a decade of experience as an IT Systems Architect at a top ranked public research university where he focused on infrastructure design and security. He is admitted to practice in the State of Connecticut, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the State of New York.

Leonardo Renna is Patent Counsel for Google, Inc. Prior to joining Google, Mr. Renna was Intellectual Property and Technology Counsel for MasterCard Worldwide. Before working in-house, Mr. Renna practiced intellectual property law at Brumbaugh, Graves, Donohue & Raymond and Baker Botts L.L.P. Mr. Renna holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Juris Doctorate from Brooklyn Law School, where he graduated cum laude. After law school, Mr. Renna served as a law clerk to the Honorable Herbert J. Hutton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Karen M. Sandler is Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, the nonprofit home of dozens of free software projects. She was previously the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Karen co-organizes the award winning Outreach Program for Women administered by the GNOME Foundation. Prior to GNOME, Karen was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). She continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC, the GNOME Foundation and QuestionCopyright.Org. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of big law firms in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor¹s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a recipient of an O’Reilly Open Source Award and also co-host of the “Free as in Freedom” podcast.

Ian Sullivan is Project Manager at the Software Freedom Law Center. Ian joined SFLC in 2005 after working as a paralegal. He received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Columbia College. In addition to his work with SFLC, Ian is the Executive Director of the Wikiotics Foundation, an educational non-profit that builds free software for language instruction. He also serves on the board of the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation and is the designer of the Book Liberator personal book scanning device.

Aaron Williamson is an attorney at Tor Ekeland, P.C., where he counsels software companies, startups, and other technology-focused clients on business transactions, FOSS and other intellectual property issues, regulatory compliance, and related matters. Previously, he worked as in-house counsel at IEEE and as a staff attorney at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he advised community free and open source software projects. He can be reached at aaron@torekeland.com.

Stefano Zacchiroli is Associate Professor of Computer Science at University Paris Diderot. His research interests span formal methods and their applications to improve software quality and user experience in the context of Free Software distributions. He has been an official member of the Debian Project since 2001, taking care of many tasks from package maintenance to distribution-wide Quality Assurance. He has been elected to serve as Debian Project Leader for 3 terms in a row, over the period 2010-2013. He is a Board Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

Information Regarding New York CLE Credits:
Columbia Law School has been certified by the New York State Continuing Legal Education (CLE) board as an Accredited Provider of CLE programs. Under New York State CLE regulations, each live non-transitional CLE panel will provide one (1.0) credit hours that can be applied toward the Areas of Professional Practice requirement. CLE credit is awarded only for full attendance of a panel in its entirety. Attorneys attending only part of a Program are not eligible for partial credit for it, although they are most welcome to attend it. Attendance is determined by an attorney’s sign-in and sign-out, as shown in the Conference registers. On sign-out, attorneys should also submit their completed Evaluation Form, provided at the Conference. Please note that NYS Certificates of Attendance will be sent out to the email address as it appears in the register unless otherwise noted there.

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