August 16, 2011

Bradley and Karen play and comment on a talk recording of Aaron Williamson's and Karen's presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled Legal Basics for Developers.

Running time: 00:53:53.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Bradley mentioned the birthday attack when explaining to Karen how likely it might be that the number of the show might match the number of the day. (01:38)
• This show is a recording of Aaron and Karen's OSCON 2011 talk, Legal Basics for Developers. (02:20)

Segment 1 (05:53)

• The slides for the Legal Basics for Developers are available to follow along with the recording (05:53)

Segment 2 (49:36)

• Richard Fontana gave at a talk at OSCON as well, which was recorded, and Karen and Bradley have asked for his permission to play it. (50:45)
• Bradley asked folks to ping Richard on identi.ca to ask him to allow us to use his audio on the oggcast. (51:05)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, non-commercial, sflc, oscon, fontana, creative-commons, aaronw, patents, copyrights, trademarks, public domain, license compatibility, compliance, non-profits, gnome, questions, conferences, gpl

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March 29, 2011

Bradley and Karen discuss two debates going on in the free and open source software community. One recent and seemingly inflated, and one long and confusing.

Running time: 00:43:18.

Show Notes

Segment 1 (03:12)

• Bradley wrote a blog post about the Bionic issues that were raised. (03:44)
• On the old oggcast, Karen and Bradley discussed the Android/Linux system and Bionic specifically. (04:09)
• Karen mentioned an old oggcast where permissive vs. copyleft licensing was discussed. (06:19)
• Jake Edge wrote an LWN article that discussed Bionic (07:58)
• Bradley mentioned Raymond Nimmer's blog that started the debate (10:52)
• Bradley also mentioned Edward Naughton's blog post and paper on Bionic. (11:38)
• Raymond Nimmer is not David Nimmer, who is known for writings on copyright (18:10)
• There is now an disturbing group on identica, which is more disturbing than a tag about disturbing. (19:15)
• Joe Brockmeier did some research on Edward Naughton's ties to Microsoft. (20:05)
• Karen mentioned a paper on deep legal analysis of header files and on originality requirements in copyright (24:40)

Segment 2 (26:07)

• Karen wanted to clear up some confusion about the discussion last episode about the “Open Source” and “Free Software” terminology.

Tags: fontana, copyrights, gpl, android, linux, bkuhn, karen, fsf, google

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February 15, 2011

Bradley and Karen discuss types of copyleft generally and introduce the basics of license compatibility and -or-later clauses.

Running time: 00:41:57.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:38)

• This show discusses copyleft and basic issues of license compatibility (04:09)
• Karen mentioned an episode of the old Software Freedom Law Show, Episode 0x08, where Bradley and Karen discussed selecting a FLOSS license and what the various options are. (04:45)
• license compatibility 06:28
• Bradley incorrectly said that the original Emacs license didn't have the word General in it. However, the other explanations appear to be correct. There's a useful history page that someone wrote about the history of GPL. It appears the non-general GNU copylefts existed from 1984-1988. (06:57)
• Karen noted that the Library GPL was renamed to the Lesser GPL which happened in 1999. (09:30)
• Bradley mentioned that when he and RMS worked on the GNU Classpath Exception, Bradley suggested it be called the Least GPL. (10:38)
• GPL doesn't have a choice of law clause. If a another copyleft does, it surely is incompatible with the GPL. (14:17)
• AGPLv3 § 13 and GPLv3 § 13 explicitly make themselves compatibility with each other, which Bradley calls compatibility by fiat. (15:40)
• Karen mentioned that the Mozilla Public License § 13 has a section about multiple licensed code (16:50).
• Bradley mentioned that Mozilla Firefox uses a combinatorial license: (GPL|LGPL|MPL), which is a disjunctive tri-license. (19:00).
• Bradley mentioned that the old Software Freedom Law Show Episode 0x17 discussed compatibility of permissively licensed software and copylefted software. (20:22 )
• Apache Software License 2.0 was likely the first FLOSS license to have an explicit patent licensing provision (23:40)
• Bradley and Karen discussed the fact that -only vs. -or-later are options with the GPL, while they are not with other copylefts, such as CC-By-SA. (30:11)

Tags: agpl, license compatibility, copyrights, gpl, bkuhn, gplv3, karen, sflc, fsf, mpl, or-later

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February 1, 2011

Bradley and Karen discuss non-commercial-only commons licenses, particularly the CC-By-NC license, and how they compare to Free Culture and Free Software licenses, and why some authors pick NC licenses instead of Free Culture/Software ones.

Running time: 00:49:32.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:36)

• Listeners seeking a show on how to select a Free Software license, differences between copyleft and non-copyleft, and how they interact with copyright are encouraged to listen to episode 0x08 of the old Software Freedom Law Show which covered these topics. Please write in again if that show doesn't cover your questions on the issue. (02:10)
• Bradley reminisced about the crass “Brian and O'Brien” show on Baltimore's B-104 Gary Huddles who was notorious locally in Baltimore because he was implicated in Maryland's version of the 1980s Savings and Loan scandals. (03:30)
• Karen mentioned that freedomdefined.org is the source for the Free Culture definition that defines what licenses are Free Culture licenses. (12:54)
• Bradley suggested listening to some of the old versions of RMS' Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks. In fact, there is an audio recording of the one at MIT on 19 April 2001 that Bradley attended, and an audio recording of the one that Bradley heard at Cardozo Law School. There is audio of the Q&A session, wherein RMS engages in that discussion Bradley mentioned with Free Culture activists. (10:10, 14:04)
• Bradley mentioned that Linus Torvalds switched to GPL for Linux because he realized non-commercial restrictions weren't appropriate. (Search the string GPL on that link to find Linus' answer on that.) (19:00)
• Karen mentioned that Creative Commons did a study considering what people understand commercial vs. non-commercial to mean. (20:43)
• Karen and Bradley discussed the text of CC-By-NC. (23:00)
• Karen mentioned various CC-By-SA licensed derivatives that had been made from Sita Sings the Blues. (38:24)
• Bradley discussed the Harry Potter Lexicon case and Karen mentioned the so-called IP Colloquium discussion on it. (44:30)
• Bradley mentioned Memory Alpha, which is a CC-By-NC wiki regarding Star Trek, which is tolerated by Paramount. (45:20)

Tags: copyrights, creative-commons, gpl, bkuhn, karen, fsf, free-culture, non-commercial

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January 18, 2011

Bradley and Karen discuss a few corrections from previous shows, and then discuss misunderstandings about the GPL regarding “revocation” of the GPL.

Running time: 00:44:45.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:34)

• Bradley issued a correction regarding FaiF 0x06. Christopher Allan Webber mentioned that FSF sometimes accepts copyright assignments in cases where the entire code base is not assigned. (02:40)
• Karen issued a correction regarding FaiF 0x04 about women being hired to be at the party, but in fact that was not the case, despite being mentioned in this article.
• Karen's paper on Medical Devices was linked to from a ZD Net UK blog. (05:48)
• Bradley mentioned this Android bug regarding mis-sent SMS, which was widely covered in the press. Apparently the bug has been resolved upstream, somewhat disproving Bradley's point. (08:40)

Segment 1 (12:19)

• Bradley is quoted in an article about revocation of the GPL (12:35).
• The story was originalyl covered on slashdot. (13:17)
• The WinMTR site now says: By popular request, WinMTR will be available under GPL v2. (19:50)
• Karen mentioned the FSF's GPL FAQ. (29:27)
• Bradley mentioned the four rationale documents There's also one for AGPLv3 draft 2 and LGPLv3 draft 2. (30:13)

Tags: bkuhn, copyrights, gpl, medical-devices, conferences, karen, sflc, fsf, correction, revocation

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January 4, 2011

Bradley and Karen discussed the inclusion of ZFS code now included in GRUB, as the GRUB Project announced and was covered at LWN by Jonathan Corbet.

Running time: 00:47:58.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:35)

• It's not mandatory that GNU projects have assignment to the FSF. The GNU Maintainer's guide discuss the requirements when items are assigned to FSF (14:40)
• FSF requires that the entire codebase be assigned once GNU project maintainers choose to assign copyrights. Conservancy's policy on copyright assignment differs here; Conservancy will accept partial copyright assignment. (16:07)
• Bradley mentioned the COBOL front end to GCC that is not in the main GCC codebase because it is not copyright assigned to FSF. (17:40)
• Bradley and Karen discussed the Squeak relicensing last call. (25:49)
• Bradley posted a comment to Corbet's article. (32:30)

Final (45:45)

• The calendar Bradley was thinking of was the International Fixed Calendar, which Wikipedia confirms, with a sourced link, was used by the Eastman Kodak Company from rom 1928 to 1989.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, fsf, conservancy, gplv3, copyrights

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November 9, 2010

Karen and Bradley discuss Stormy Peters' departure from the GNOME Foundation, an issue of deep confusion regarding copyright licensing, and references to Spock in a recent court decision.

Running time: 00:39:56.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:35)

• Bradley confirmed the entire show is licensed CC-By-SA 3.0 (02:30)
• Stormy Peters is leaving the position of GNOME Foundation's Executive Director. (04:10)
• The GNOME Advisory Board is a group of for-profit and non-profit organizations that meet regularly to give advice to GNOME Foundation. (04:34)
• Stormy is going to a job at the Mozilla Foundation. (09:10)
• You don't have to be a developer to become a member of the GNOME Foundation. (09:57)
• Bradley mentioned that he did an FSF booth at COMDEX Chicago in early 2001 (which Bradley incorrectly called CES Chicago in the recording). (12:20)

Segment 1 (15:43)

• A LiveJournal post introduced an interesting issue of copyright confusion. (16:30)
• Karen mentioned there was discussion in other fora other than the original LiveJournal post, such as on the NY Frunch (Free Culture Lunch) mailing list and, since then, on NPR. (17:24)
• Bradley mentioned Fanzines, wondering if there are still fanzines. (18:57)
• Karen pointed out that both copyright infringement and plagiarism were at issue here. (20:25)
• Bradley is quite upset about the idea that people confuse public domain with FaiF licensing or any other actual license terms. (21:00)
• Karen notes that if you don't see a license, you have to assume it's all rights reserved. (23:10)
• Bradley described a Slashdot story that linked to a Techdirt article. (30:29)
• A footnote in the concurrence is what mentions Star Trek (33:03) .
• Bradley mentioned a mediocre novel he read in the 1990s called Brain Storm by Richard Dooling. (33:26)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, Stormy Peters, public domain, Star Trek

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June 8, 2010

Karen, Bradley and Aaron talk about SFLC's motion for default judgment against Westinghouse Digital Electronics, a defendant in the ongoing lawsuit concerning GPL violations of BusyBox.

Running time: 38:15.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Bradley quoted from Act I Scene II of Hamlet, in which he once played Bernardo in a college production. Karen never played Bernardo (01:02)
• Aaron mentioned Shakespeare's son Hamnet. (01:53)
• The play Karen quotes from is indeed Julius Caesar. She forgot that she also had the lines: “My lord?” and “I will, my lord. ”(02:25)
• The Bilski decision once again did not come out this week. The Supreme Court publishes all decisions on its website. The SCOTUS blog provides up to date information about the court schedule, including a live blog on the mornings when decisions are announced.(03:03)
• Karen thinks that Aaron and Bradley do not know that the cake is a lie. (03:54)
• Karen mentions patent number 3,987,541: Cutting guide for layered cake. (04:39)
• SFLC filed a motion in the Southern District of New York against Westinghouse Digital Electronics, a defendant in the ongoing lawsuit concerning GPL violations of BusyBox. (05:10)
• The original complaint in the ongoing case can be found here. (08:05)
• The motion for default judgment or summary judgment can be found here. (09:00)
• Shira Scheindlin is not related to Judge Judy, at least to the best of our knowledge. (10:23)
• Karen mentioned Serving Sara, so we provide the obligatory IMDB link. Other sources for how service should be provided would probably be more reliable. (15:30)
• Sewer service, as described by Aaron, is invalid service. Or you can use google, but that will mostly teach you about sewers and their maintenance. (18:46)

Tags: compliance, copyrights, gpl, aaronw, bkuhn, karen, sflc, conservancy

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March 16, 2010

Aaron, Karen and Bradley discuss issues around the public domain and how it relates to copyright in general and copyrights on software in particular.

Running time: 00:58:13.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:36)

• Aaron, Bradley, and Karen consider Aaron's status as a “special host”. Bradley wondered if that meant Aaron hosted a parasite. (Aaron subsequently got sick two days after recording, and is now playing the role of a biological “special host”.)
• Bradley joked that copyright never expires in the USA due to retroactive extensions enacted by Congress. Aaron noted the Sony Bono 1998 Copyright Extension Act was the most recent act to do this. (05:47, 06:28)
• Public domain dedications are relatively easy in the USA, but moral rights issues in European jurisdictions make public domain dedications difficult. (17:19)
• The Berne Convention respects the issue of public domain, insofar as something definitely in the public domain in one country doesn't fall under copyright restrictions in other countries, but doesn't do much more than that regarding public domain. (17:30)
• Creative Commons wrote CC0 to attempt to harmonize public domain dedication around the world. (18:53)
• Bradley pointed out that the “WTFPL” license FAQ points out that it exists in part because of difficulties in putting things in the public domain in some jurisdictions. (25:36)
• Karen looked up the word merchantability in Black's Law Dictionary. (30:07)

Segment 1 (29:52)

• Bradley was apparently wrong, saleable is a word, and some few online dictionaries say sailable is a word (30:30)
• Aaron mentioned the Typography for Lawyers website, which has a good section on using all-caps text. (33:27)
• Bradley encouraged use of \textsc{} in LaTeX instead of writing in all caps, but laments that lawyers he's talked to about it can't be convinced. (34:30)
• Black's Law Dictionary says public domain is the rule; intellectual property is the exception. Bradley lamented that he wishes that were actually true. (35:17)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, aaronw, public domain

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January 5, 2010

Karen and Bradley interview this show's first-ever second-time guest, Richard Fontana, who is an Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel at Red Hat.

Running time: 00:49:44.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:29)

Bradley and Karen introduce the guest, Richard Fontana.

Segment 1 (00:58)

• Richard Fontana, who is an Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel at Red Hat. Richard Fontana is an Open Source Licensing and Paten Counsel at Red Hat. (01:44)
• Our discussions with Fontana stemmed from his OSCON 2009 talk, Improving Legal Certainty in FOSS: Best Practices for Upstream Projects. He provided his slides from that talk to us and our listeners. The are Copyright © 2009, Red Hat. Inc., licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 USA license. (01:50)
• Fontana and Bradley discussed at length the “folk wisdom” about LGPLv2 that differs from the letter of the terms, and how it compares to LGPLv3. Specifically, the text in LGPLv2§3 that reads:

  To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License.

  (13:19, 15:24)
• Fontana compared the legal interpretation and practices around Free Software to the medieval “lex mercatoria” (18:56)
• Fontana pointed out that the lex mercatoria is, in some ways, the basis of the Uniform Commercial Code. (19:50)
• Fontana referenced one of the early GPL enforcement efforts regarding the Objective C front end to GCC (23:03)
• Bradley referenced the debian-legal debate regarding the AGPLv3. (31:20)
• Fontana mentioned that the Fedora licensing policies require that licenses meet the FSF's Free Software Definition (32:39)
• Bradley discussed that developers tend to dislike CC-0 due to its complexity because they prefer simpler (although perhaps less effective) public domain dedications. (40:38)

Segment 2 (44:19)

• Karen points out that license interpretation is often an exercise in risk analysis. (45:02)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, fontana, red hat, copyrights, gpl

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December 22, 2009

Karen and Bradley discuss enforcement of the GNU General Public License, and in particular the lawsuits recently filed by SFLC against various violators of the GPL.

Running time: 00:33:11.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:32)

• Bradley mentioned that FLOSS Weekly had a proprietary software guest, Ubuntu One. (01:02)
• Bradley and Aaron Williamson were interviewed on Linux Outlaws about the GPL violation lawsuit. (01:20)
• Listeners will know Aaron Williamson from when he sat in for Karen on Episode 0x18, and was interviewed on Bradley and Karen on the very special episode about SFLC's amicus brief in Jacobsen v. Katzer. (01:25)
• SFLC announced that it filed a lawsuit regarding GPL enforcement. (02:03)
• Bradley misspoke that Tom Hanks (as a guest on Saturday Night Live) played Mr. No Depth Perception. It was, in fact, Kevin Nealon.
• Karen mentioned Bradley's blog post about finding one violation per day. (08:24)
• Bradley mentioned the WRT54G enforcement against Linksys that spawned communities like OpenWRT. (11:36)
• Bradley mentioned that getting build instructions and scripts to control compilation and installation of the executable (GPLv2), or Installation Information (v3). (16:57)

Segment 1 (17:50)

• SFLC's A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance outlines requirements commonly asked of violators when bringing them back into compliance. (18:02)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, sflc, gplv3, copyrights, gpl

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November 19, 2009

Bradley and Karen interview Jeremy Allison of the the Samba Team.

Running time: 00:55:38.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:11)

Bradley and Karen let folks know that we are releasing the podcast early so that folks traveling for the holiday in the USA can get it early and listen to it while traveling.

Segment 1 (01:35)

• Bradley mentioned PRI as well as NPR to be fair to Ira Glass. (02:20)
• This episode is somewhat of a follow up to Episode 0x10 with Carlo Piana. (04:31)

Segment 2 (05:47)

• Jeremy Allison from the Samba Project is our guest. (06:20)
• Jeremy noted that the Active Directory support has been the most easily implemented technical outcome of the EU agreement. (07:03)
• Jeremy noted that the documentation from Microsoft received through the EU has somewhat taken the fun out of development of Samba, since network analysis is less necessary. (07:47)
• Jeremy mentioned his colleague Tridge's very good article describing the French café technique of protocol analysis. (08:10)
• Jeremy wrote a column called Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard, which talks about some of the technical details that were uncovered after the EU agreement. (09:25)
• Jeremy discussed that he resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft/Novell deal. (19:33)
• Jeremy discussed his a video released on the FSF website. (45:20)

Segment 3 (49:20)

• Karen corrected Bradley's misconception regarding how statutory damages work under copyright law. (49:43)
• Karen encouraged people to just comply with the GPL since it's easy, and look at A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance. (52:00)
• Bradley mentioned he was a judge at the quiz bowl where Jeremy imitated Steve Balmer. (53:00)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, microsoft, anti-trust, gpl, Jeremy Allison

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November 10, 2009

Bradley and Karen interview Mike Linksvayer of the Creative Commons .

Running time: 00:49:21.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:28)

• Bradley and Karen discuss whether 0x1A is a “landmark” in hex. (01:00)
• Dan Lynch, SFLS Producer, is a host of Linux Outlaws. (02:25)
• Bradley quoted Larry Wall from one of his 1999 State of the Onion speech. (03:45)

Segment 1 (05:48)

• Our guest is Mike Linksvayer of the Creative Commons. (06:05)
• Mike is the longest serving employee of Creative Commons. (06:56)
• CC-by-SA is the most popular Creative Commons license with the software freedom crowd. (13:40)
• CC-Attribution is another license type that Mike mentioned (14:00)
• Mike quoted from various sections of CC-by-SA to make the point that there are methods to avoid misrepresentation (19:15)
• Mike pointed out fair use can even be used to misrepresent a person's views, so prohibiting derivative works for that purpose sometimes doesn't even help. (24:00)
• Mike, Bradley, and Karen discussed the Wikipedia move from FDL to CC-By-SA. Mike pointed out that a “one magnet” need in copyleft. (26:12)
• Mike mentioned that the Fedora project recently switched to CC-By-SA for their documentation and wikis. (27:17)
• Mike, Bradley and Karen discussed issues related to autonomo.us. (33:00)

Segment 2 (38:47)

• Mike and Karen will follow up to discuss whether CC-By-SA would be a better license for the Software Freedom Law Show or other works by lawyers. (39:20)
• Bradley changed the license of his website to CC-By-SA. (40:10)
• Bradley and Karen discussed identi.ca. (42:00)
• Donald Knuth organized his kitchen around the trash can. (46:00)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, numbering, copyrights, creative-commons

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September 29, 2009

Bradley and Karen give the ath5k talk that they previously gave at the Linux Collaboration Summit in April 2009.

Running time: 00:41:12.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Bradley looked for a web reference on the “you'll know it is time to turn the page, when … “, but could find none.

Segment 1 (04:03)

• Follow along with the slides for this talk. (Javascript required for full effect)

Segment 2 (36:55)

• Bradley mentioned his desire to keep a good bridge between the copyleft and non-copyleft communities. (38:35)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, gpl, linux

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September 15, 2009

Karen and Bradley discuss issues surrounding the licensing of software documentation, and FSF's objection to the Google Books Proposed Settlement.

Running time: 00:50:41.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Bradley mentioned the topic for this show was suggested on identi.ca (01:15) by Dan Scott (01:39) who works on a project called Evergreen (02:36)
• Dan had asked earlier about FaiF documentation licenses. (03:04) Bradley met him at FSOSS, which is held at Seneca at York. (Bradley misspoke during the podcast and confused Seneca and York.) (01:30)
• Bradley talked about this history of the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). (04:40)
• Bradley mentioned the (mostly) defunct Open Publication License. (05:37)
• Karen referenced the Debian decision about FDL. (06:20)
• The FDL allows for invariant sections. (10:50)
• Debian decided that invariant sections are not DFSG-free. (11:20)
• FSF released GNU FDL 1.3 to allow relicensing of some FDL works under CC-By-SA. FSF's announced this in November 2008 and Bradley blogged about it. (19:00)
• FSF does have a discussion draft of the GNU Simpler Free Documentation License available. (22:03)
• Bradley recommends licensing documentation under (GPLv3-or-later|CC-By-SA-2.0-or-later) or (GPLv3-or-later|FDL-2.1-or-later|CC-By-SA-2.0-or-later). (28:00, 32:05)
• Bradley restated his hatred for the term “dual licensing” because of its ambiguity. He refers to the above as “disjunctive dual licensing” (30:10)
• Bradley and Karen mentioned they will talk about public domain eventually, but for the moment, people should look at CC-0. (32:30)
• Karen says we'll do the public domain show before Episode 0xDEAD, which would be our 57,006th show.

Segment 1 (33:47)

• Karen talked about the SFLC helped the FSF file an objection to the Google Books settlement. (34:50)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, license compatibility, documentation

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June 15, 2009

Karen and Bradley discuss the SFLC's amicus brief in the Jacobsen v. Katzer with their colleague, Aaron Williamson.

Running time: 00:19:01.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:27)

• Bradley referred to the two different types of Latin pronunciation, which he learned in school as: Classic and Church. (01:33)
• Karen explains what an amicus brief is. (01:47)
• Aaron explained that the earlier court ruling that was a success for Free Software. (03:38)
• An injunction in this context is a ruling from a court that the violator of the license must stop their activity that infringes the copyright. (05:46)
• Karen explained why Free Software licenses are interpreted as copyright licenses rather than contracts, and why that is advantageous. (06:15)
• Aaron explained why preliminary injunctions are a particular important remedy for Free Software developers. (07:00)
• Karen mentioned we would have a direct link to our brief in the show notes, which is there and in the summary as well. (10:45)
• Bradley mentioned his work regarding the Artistic-1.0 license (which is detailed in a blog post). (11:30, 13:30)
• Each court has a different admission process. (14:27)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, aaronw, jacobsen

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March 3, 2009

Bradley and Karen discuss the issues and considerations for a FLOSS project selecting a license.

Running time: 00:40:30.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:25)

• Bradley mentioned license proliferation. (02:50)
• Karen mentioned the FSF License List. (04:40)
• Although they are saying it too fast, Bradley and Karen are saying the word “Affero”, referring to the Affero GPL. (06:50)
• Bradley and Karen discussed weak copyleft, such as the Lesser GPL. (16:00)
• Bradley mentioned thisSoftware Freedom Law Show: blog post of his where he says most developers have traditionally seen a licensing decision as something you think about once and never revisit!. (22:35)
• Karen mentioned the SFLC Primer.
• Bradley mentioned checking if a license is on the FSF License List, on the OSI License List and if it's DFSG-Free before using it. (27:21)

Segment 1 (28:15)

Karen and Bradley debate various issues about license selection.

Tags: agpl, patents, trademarks, copyrights, bkuhn, karen, fsf, gplv3

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February 17, 2009

In this episode of the Software Freedom Law Show, Bradley and Karen interview Van Lindberg of the law firm, Haynes and Boone. The discussion centers around explaining the difference between copyrights, patents and trademarks to Free Software developers.

Running time: 00:40:18.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:28)

• Unlike our previous guests Scott and Richard, Van is an external, or outside counsel, who are lawyers hired by the company or organization that advise it from the outside. External lawyers are often employees of law firms, as Van is. (02:07)

Segment 1 (03:47)

Interview with Van Lindberg.

• Van is an associate at a law firm called Haynes and Boone (04:15).
• The term we don't like that Bradley keeps referring to is “intellectual property”, which has often been criticized by people in the Software Freedom world, initially in the writings of Richard Stallman. (12:29)
• Karen asked if Van is a patent lawyer. “Patent lawyers” are lawyers who are the member of the bar in some state, and have also taken a special exam to allow them to practice before the United States Patent Office. “Patent agents” are non-lawyers who have taken the same exam and can also practice before the United States Patent Office. Practicing before the patent office is unique in the USA, as you can do so without going to law school and passing a state-level bar exam. (13:30)
• Van's book is Intellectual Property and Open Source, published by O'Reilly. (36:50)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, lindberg, patents, copyrights, trademarks