Jacobsen v Katzer Settled — Victory For F/OSS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday February 19, 2010 @05:44AM from the nice-to-come-out-on-top-for-a-change dept.

Andy Updegrove writes "A short while ago the parties to one of the most closely watched FOSS cases filed a settlement agreement with the US Federal District Court for the Northern District of California ending one of the most important F/OSS legal cases to date. That case is Jacobsen vs. Katzer, and the settlement marks a complete victory for Jacobsen, a member of the Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) Project. Jacobsen's victory establishes several important rights for the first time in the US: the right to prevent their copyright and authorship acknowledgments from being removed from their code, and the right to collect damages if the terms of the licenses they choose are violated. Until now, those rights had never been tested in court."

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Great news! by ais523 · 2010-02-19 06:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

But does the fact that this was settled, rather than taken to a final judgement, mean that it doesn't set a binding precedent?

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At some level we got lucky by JoshuaZ · 2010-02-19 08:46 · Score: 3, Interesting

The license used was the Artistic License which in its early forms (and the form that as I understand it applied here) has issues and really was not at all the ideal test case for a copyleft license. The license has been extensively criticized for vague and poor wording from the EFF and other legal experts.