Intellectual Property and Open Source

by Lindberg, Van

• ISBN13: 9780596517960
• ISBN10: 0596517963
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-07-01
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

Headlines about lawsuits and policy battles concerning copyrights and patents burst upon the computer field every week. Programmers, system administrators, graphic designers, and many others in computing realize they need to know more about intellectual property - but the sources of information are too scattered, too arcane, and too hard to read. Even worse, many people spread misinformation or claim to provide answers by applying flawed analogies. This book, written by a programmer and intellectual property attorney, can place the computer field on a firm basis for understanding, applying, and debating key concepts in copyrights, trade secrets, patents, and trademarks. It also places open source movements in the context of current U.S. law.

Author Biography

The title that best describes Van Lindberg's job is "translator" - translating from "lawyer" to "engineer" and back. He enjoys working with both computer code and legal code to get things done.

As an attorney, Van helps people build businesses around ideas. His experience allows him to analyze and evaluate intellectual property in a sale, license or litigation context. Van also participates in the Open Source community. He helps businesses work with and develop Open Source software and helps developers navigate the legal system to achieve project goals. He has direct experience in digital circuit design; operating system design; application programming; networked and distributed systems; virtualization; wireless networking; high-availability systems and programming languages.

Outside of the traditional IP areas, Van is particularly interested in the Open Source licensing model. He has been involved (mostly as a user, but with occasional contributions) in the Open Source community since 1994. Van's favorite computer language is Python.

Table of Contents

The Economic and Legal Foundations of Intellectual Property	p. 1
The Patent Document	p. 21
The Patent System	p. 49
Copyright	p. 71
Trademarks	p. 103
Trade Secrets	p. 119
Contracts and Licenses	p. 133
The Economic and Legal Foundations of Open Source Software	p. 153
So I Have an Idea	p. 179
Choosing a License	p. 197
Accepting Patches and Contributions	p. 215
Working With the GPL	p. 223
Reverse Engineering	p. 239
Incorporating as a Non7profit	p. 253
Sample Proprietary Information Agreement (PIA)	p. 271
Open Source License List	p. 281
Free Software License List	p. 285
Fedora License List and GPL Compatibility	p. 289
Public Domain Declaration	p. 299
The Simplified BSD License	p. 301
The Apache License, Version 2.0	p. 303
The Mozilla Public License, Version 1.1	p. 309
The GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1	p. 319
The GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 3	p. 329
The GNU General Public License, Version 2, June 1991	p. 333
The GNU General Public License, Version 3, June 2007	p. 341
The Open Software License, Version 3.0	p. 355
Index	p. 359
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.