Copyright Protection Problems For OSS Project

An anonymous reader writes "There's a federal case in the Northern District of California where copyright for open source is being challenged. The free software project JMRI discovered that a commercial company was using some of their files in a product, in violation of the license. They added a copyright claim to an ongoing legal action about cybersquatting, software patent abuse, etc. The patent case was covered on Slashdot back in June but the copyright part is new. The other side came back with an argument that copyright law didn't apply, simply because they software was 'being given away for free.'"

Comments

you'd think, but...

[SuperBanana]

Yeah, right.

You'd think- but the asshole (Matt Katzer) filed an anti-SLAPP lawsuit in response to a lawsuit seeking him to cease and desist (he was hounding a government research facility that was employing one of the JMRI authors and JMRI had enough)..basically won it, and got over $30K for his attorneys...and that's AFTER their claims for legal fees were determined to be excessive/unreasonable, and reduced!

He's run out and filed patents for stuff days after someone else announced they developed it...then turned around and demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties. Made absolutely insane, blatantly false assertations.

Both his lawyers should be disbarred based on the level of falsehoods present in court filings. EFF, where the hell are you? I'm always hearing about I should donate to the EFF, but I don't see them doing a fucking thing for JMRI to fend off this sleaze.