[Ecommerce] FYI: Open Source Law Center Opens Doors

[Manon Ress]

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3466751

  February 1, 2005
Open Source Law Center Opens Doors
By Jim Wagner and Michael Singer

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- A $4 million investment made by the Open Source
Development Labs has helped create a center to provide free legal
support to free and open source software (FOSS) projects.

The legal firm now known as the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) will
be run by noted copyright lawyer Eben Moglen from its headquarters in
New York, and staffed with two full-time intellectual property lawyers
to provide pro bono legal support. Two more IP lawyers are expected to
join the center later this year. Moglen said he would aggressively
recruit from a talent pool of recent law school graduates. OSDL
announced the formation of the spin-off organization during its hosted
Enterprise Linux Summit here this week.

"This is about taking care of the goose that laid the golden egg and not
letting wolves come in the middle of the night and steal it away,"
Moglen said during a press conference. "This is a legal firm not
involved so much in litigating and defending as it will be for
counseling and advising and nurturing non-profits and to prevent
millions of dollars in litigation."

Litigation support is one of four services to be operated out the
center, the others are: asset stewardship, to avoid IP claim conflicts;
licensing, for license review and compatibility analysis; and legal
consulting and lawyer training, to consult with the public and help
train lawyers interested in the GNU General Public License (GPL).

"As the popularity and use of free and open source software increases
and proprietary software development models are threatened, providing
necessary legal services to open source developers is becoming
increasingly important to prevent liability and other legal issues from
interfering with its success," Moglen said.

The center will also play a direct role in participating in the revision
to the GPL, which isn't expected for at least another year.

While Moglen will run the SFLC as chairman and director-counsel, others
will guide the center's activities. Three other directors named include:
Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School; Diane Peters,
general counsel at the OSDL; and Daniel Weitzner, director of the World
Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) technology and society activities. Daniel
Ravicher, founder and executive director of the Public Patent Foundation
(PUBPAT), will take part in the management of the center, as legal director.

Peters told internetnews.com SFLC is already thinking ahead to
establishing offices in Europe and Asia, where legal issues around FOSS
are a bit more complicated. "Any time you can give front-end advice
instead of litigation advice is beneficial," Peters said. "We expect to
fully be in contact with the larger OSDL members and their general
councils as well." Peters said the SFLC will also help augment
commercial IP protection ventures such as source code investigation
companies like Black Duck as well as IP insurance services from Open
Source Risk Management (OSRM).

One of the problems facing many FOSS developers is finding and avoiding
the use of patented IP in software. With thousands of software patents
logged in at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) and its
counterparts in other countries, avoiding infringement, and more
importantly litigation, becomes a more difficult task.

Case in point is the current litigation against IBM (Quote, Chart) by
the SCO Group (Quote, Chart). While, at heart, the lawsuit is a contract
dispute -- IBM allegedly used SCO's Unix System V source code to bolster
the Linux kernel -- it's expected that if SCO wins in its case, it will
be able to charge a license fee to anyone who uses the Linux kernel.

In 2003, the Lindon, Utah, company sent warning letters to Fortune 1000
companies and its own customer base, requiring proof their Linux systems
were not using its Unix System V source code; if they were, the
companies were threatened to pay a $700 per-server license fee or risk
violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). The company took
two of its customers, AutoZone (Quote, Chart) and Daimler-Chrysler
(Quote, Chart), to court. Both cases await the conclusion of the SCO v.
IBM case.

Where IBM has deep pockets to fund a legal defense, many FOSS projects
don't.

"Both free and open source software face many emerging legal threats,"
Lessig said in a statement. "We should be skeptical of legal mechanisms
that enable those most threatened by the success of open source and free
software to resist its advance. The Law Center will serve as important
support for the free and open source communities and for those that
benefit from free and open source software."

Lawrence Rosen, general counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI),
told internetnews.com that the establishment of a separate legal group
is not an admission of a legal problem with using open source software,
nor does it mean that SCO's claims have any merit.

"The more and more that companies adopt open source, the more likely
they will have questions about the legal issues surrounding the IP,"
Rosen said. "In my opinion, open source software is just as safe as
using proprietary software. But for the enterprise, you need to know the
legalities of any software before you use it."

OSDL has been a vocal proponent and supporter when it comes to
supporting open source projects and was formed to foster the development
of enterprise Linux applications. Linus Torvalds, the Linux kernel
creator who works at the lab on kernel-specific improvements to the
software, is expected to comment on the role of the Law Center during a
roundtable discussion here Tuesday.

Last year, along with Intel (Quote, Chart), IBM and other companies, the
OSDL gathered $3 million and used it to start a Linux Legal Defense Fund
to help individuals pay for any legal costs that arise because of the
SCO case.

Moglen said the SFLC is the next logical step.

"We are in a space where it was a fringe technology that has evolved
into source of billions of dollars in value from airlines to banks to
artists and advertising agencies," Moglen said.




--
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

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