November 1, 2017

The Software Freedom Law Center invites counsel, developers, enterprise users and other members of free and open source software (FOSS) communities to join us once again for our free annual conference to explore legal issues surrounding FOSS, held at Columbia Law School on Friday, November 3, 2017.

Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will give the keynote address on “Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power” exploring how we can preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet.

In our morning session on Licenses and Compliance, David Levine and Richard Fontana of Red Hat will examine the notion of licenses as shared resources, with comments provided by Professor Benkler and Professor Eben Moglen, Software Freedom Law Center’s founder and Executive Director.

Shane Coughlan of the OpenChain Project and David Marr of Qualcomm will then give an update on the status of OpenChain. Rounding out the morning session, Mike Dolan and Steven Rostedt of the Linux Foundation will discuss the Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement.

The first session of the afternoon on Fintech and FOSS will begin with a presentation by Sharyn O’Halloran, Professor of Political Economy and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, on FOSS Fintech Risk Management, which will be moderated by Professor Moglen.

Professor O’Halloran’s presentation will be followed by “Fintech Development: FOSS and the Financial Industry” with Jim Jagielski of Capital One and the Apache Software Foundation, Vipin Bharathan of BNP Paribas and Hyperledger, and Mishi Choudhary of Software Freedom Law Center.

Professor Moglen and Mishi Choudhary will then provide a review and discussion of legal issues currently impacting FOSS, including trademark squatting, employment agreements and changes at the IRS. Professor Moglen will wrap up the day’s affairs with some closing remarks.

The conference will take place at Columbia Law School, 435 West 116th Street, NYC, on November 3, 2017 from 8:30am to 5:30pm. No registration is required and attendance is free, but if room occupancy limits are reached preference will be given 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 via on-site registration starting at 8:30am.

The full conference program and speaker biographies are available from the Conference Event Page.

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, this live non-transitional CLE Program will provide 7 credit hours that can be applied toward the Areas of Professional Practice requirement. CLE credit is awarded only to New York attorneys for full attendance of the Program 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 the NYS Certificates of Attendance will be sent to the email address as it appears in the register unless otherwise noted there.

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