An Open Source Legal Breakthrough

jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.' The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."

Comments

This is the first I have heard of this case

[erroneus]

That is a TRULY balzy thing to do -- use open source, patent it and send bills for payment to the original author for patent infringement.

This is a wilful abuse of all sorts of systems... the patent system, copyright and the legal system. A person like that needs to be billed for all the time he wasted in the government and then barred from participating the in owning patents or copyrights.

Re:I'm trusting the summary this time

[Sloppy]

Now the trial court found no copyright rights existed because copyright law is solely meant to protect economic rights.

That court has lost its way, and the appellate court's decision doesn't really correct it (though it certainly helps Jacobsen's case).

Copyright law is meant "to promote the progress of the arts and .. sciences." Anyone who looks at it in economic terms only, ignores an entire spectrum of human motivation, of which economic advantage, while important, is merely a part.

People sure as hell don't acquire things (e.g. train control software) for economic reasons ("ooh, my model train is now more efficient; I can finally crush my play-freight-delivering competitors!"), so why would economic reasons be the only motivation for producing things? It's absurd. It's also something any amateur programmer -- no, actually, any hobbyist in any field whatsoever -- would trivially understand.