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RECENT ENTRIES
Posted on Friday, Dec 21, 2012
The business case for offering a mobile app can be compelling: an app can give a business a constant presence on its customers’ mobile desktop, building brand awareness and allowing easy and direct interaction. But businesses that roll out apps need to pay attention to privacy rules, too, as the recent enforcement action by California’s Attorney General reminds us.
Posted on Friday, Jun 29, 2012
Talk about unintended consequences: Rob Landley, a lead developer of BusyBox, announced that he was rewriting that program solely to disarm GPL enforcers. In response, several other copyright holders came forward to hand the enforcers some bigger and more effective weapons.
Posted on Tuesday, Jun 12, 2012
Advising clients on open source is always hard, because there’s not much law but a lot of lore. There are a couple of court decisions that discuss open source licensing, but they don’t get at the really complicated and interesting issues that arise in the day-to-day.
Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2012
It’s “The End Of Programming As We Know It”! Oracle is going to “rewrite software law” to create crushing legal burdens on cloud computing! People will soon be able to copyright anything – there could even be a “land grab” for common words that would allow them to “lockdown” programming!
Posted on Tuesday, May 1, 2012
It’s now up to a jury in San Francisco to determine whether Google’s Android mobile platform infringes Oracle’s copyrights in the code and documentation for the Java Platform. Or is it?
Posted on Wednesday, Apr 4, 2012
A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories that promises to significantly disrupt well-established (and investment-backed) expectations in the biotech industry.
Tags:Mayo v. Prometheus
Posted on Tuesday, Mar 6, 2012
Over on Groklaw, a recent post suggested that the copyright claims in Oracle v. Google might give rise to a defense of copyright misuse. The copyright issues in that case have been fascinating from the start: Google has argued, for instance, that software APIs are per se uncopyrightable. Judge Alsup rejected this argument, but I expect that we’ll hear more about it before the case is over.
Tags:copyright, Oracle v. Google
Posted on Tuesday, Feb 14, 2012
The debate over GPL enforcement continues, with the two leading GPL enforcers lashing back at the “anti-copyleft” forces.
A few weeks ago, Rob Landley sparked a firestorm of controversy within the FOSS community when he criticized the GPL enforcement campaigns conducted by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).
Posted on Friday, Feb 10, 2012
Back in the fall I wrote about the flap over the HP TouchPad tablets that were shipped with Android 2.2, or FroYo, installed. The TouchPad was a WebOS-powered tablet, but somehow at least a few units had Android installed. Most thought that these were test units that were never meant to be sold.
Posted on Friday, Feb 3, 2012
Rob Landley thinks so. One of the principal developers of BusyBox, Landley was a lead plaintiff in some of the enforcement actions brought by the Software Freedom Law Center a few years ago. He’s now leading up a project, called Toybox, to rewrite BusyBox and release it under a more permissive, non-GPL license. And for doing that, Landley’s drawn a lot of fire from free software advocates.
