The Biggest Legal Danger For Open Source?

itwbennett writes "Brian Proffitt is blogging about the undercurrent of legal issues troubling the open source world these days and offers up this question: Are patents or copyright a bigger threat to the open source community? Patents are the obvious choice, with inflicting fear being the 'obvious intention of those who have instigated the various legal troubles on open source practitioners.' But the issue of copyright and copyright assignments is no less troublesome, argues Proffitt. And copyright assignment can be confusingly Machievllian, even in open source land."

Comments

Patents

[afidel]

Because copyright can only cover a specific implementation but patents can now cover an idea in such a way that there is no alternative way to implement it. Not only that but all copyleft open source licenses actually rely on copyrights in order to make the mandates of the license enforceable.

Re:Patents

[ozmanjusri]

end of discussion. No more comments are needed.

Not quite.

Malevolent organisations which don't respect community commons are the threat. Patents are just one of their tools.

Until those organisations are reigned in, they will continue inventing ways to diminish the value of projects which threaten their income.

Re:Patents

[geminidomino]

Patents do not cover "an idea". They cover a specific solution, which for software is a specific algorithm

Reality doesn't mesh with your statement.

One-click, anyone?

Re:Patents

[nitehawk214]

nor have they stopped contributing to culture.

Me thinks you have never seen an episode of Hannah Montana.

Contributing to the demise, is still contributing.

Re:I only have 2 things to say to Brian Proffitt

[Samantha Wright]

Here's a better joke using the same material.

Threats to open source:

1. Patents
2. Copyrights
3. ???
4. Proffitt!
5. Other bloggers.

*DRM* and patents, not copyright and patents

[ciaran_o_riordan]

DRM and signed hardware is the biggest legal threat beside patents.

If we liberate the PC, only to find that people are doing their computing on handheld computers (such as phones) and games consoles which won't boot if the software's not approved, then we'll be shafted.

The answer is (as it always was) that we have to educate people about what sovereignty/liberty/independence means for computing, and that having freedom is valuable. That takes years (ask RMS), but it's the only way to win successive battles. There's no point in defeating some current problem if the same attack will succeed later under a different guise.

After DRM and patents, the big problem is centralised social networking, where people do their computing on remote servers which they have no control over.