[Incubator] IP Issues [was Incubation Committee meeting Monday 17th]

[Bruce Bannerman]

Arnulf,

There is nothing wrong with Intellectual Property*. OSGeo and other Open
Source Projects have considerable IP invested in them.

There may come a time when OSGeo needs to defend 'its' IP.


As to potentially engaging lawyers, there is always FSF, perhaps.

See [1] for an example of where the Debian Community engaged FSF to look at
software patents.

Bruce

[1] http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq


* I do not refer to software patents in this statement.


------ Forwarded Message

*From: *Arnulf Christl <arnulf at osgeo.org>
*Reply-To: *<arnulf at osgeo.org>
*Date: *Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:29:02 +1100
*To: *<incubator at lists.osgeo.org>
*Subject: *Re: [Incubator] Incubation Committee meeting Monday 17th


On 01/15/2012 05:57 AM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> On 14/01/12 11:00, Arnulf Christl wrote:
>> On 01/13/2012 06:05 AM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>>> On 12/01/12 23:46, Daniel Morissette wrote:
>>>> I agree that we should avoid implying that we had a formal
>>>> legal/lawyer review. Perhaps the "Legal" section could be named
>>>> "Intellectual Property and License"?
>>> Good idea, I've updated the title in the wiki with "Intellectual
>>> Property and License"
>>>
>> 2Ct sideways: ...if at all possible I would try to avoid using the term
>> "Intellectual Property" in official statements because it is a malicious
>> Meme. Simply by using it we subscribe to the concept. But Open Source
>> does not function on "intellectual property" (if I ever have to use it,
>> I at least put it in quotes).
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Arnulf
>>
> This section about checking license, patents, copyright, trademark is
> becoming tricky to title.
> "Legal" has been rejected, as it implies a lawyer has been involved. (We
> don't have budget for lawyers).
>
> "Intellectual Property" is now being suggested against, as it goes
> against of free-loving philosophy.
>
> Arnulf, would you care to suggest an alternative heading?
> Would you be happy with quotes inserted as:
>     License and "Intellectual Property"
>
>
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Project_Graduation_Checklist#Intellectual_Property_and_LicenseLicense

Cameron,
I think that we can use the term legal and that we do have funding (and
more so that we can raise more if it would become necessary). Using the
term legal in my opinion should also not be a problem because even if we
"had" (as in employed) one or two lawyers it would not make any
difference because as a global organization we are potentially involved
with hundreds of legal systems. Maybe our Rest-of-the-World perception
is playing tricks on us again, there is no one legal system that we have
to defend against (although it seems there is one legal system which is
especially dumb wrt software and soup - or as they called it "SOPA").

Just to add to my earlier post: We should not suggest that we deny the
existence of "Intellectual Property". Just like we respect proprietary
business models (but believe that they are inferior to Open Source
models) and we do not support "piracy" (yet another word that has
connotations which I do not subscribe to).

On top of this I believe that we do have quite a lot of competence legal
wise in the broader community of OSGeo and should not undervalue this
just because we have no legalese speaking native of one of many
jurisdictions.

Hope this makes sense.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

--
President, OSGeo
http://www.osgeo.org
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