The Centre Daily carried a story that Intertrust Technologies has completed a patent licensing deal giving Motorola global rights "to practice Intertrust's broad inventions in trusted distributed computing and digital rights management. Motorola's license covers all products, including mobile and digital television devices."
The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon on behalf of the two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GPL V2. BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems and is open source software licensed under GPL version 2.
An Information Week article says that:
The case against Verizon, however, marks the first time SFLC has sought to defend the GPL in court against a multibillion dollar industry giant. As such, it could provide a key test of the legal validity of the GPL -- a license that's used by thousands of open source developers. Some companies, includingMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT), have said they believe parts of the GPL are not legally enforceable.
Intertrust Technologies announced a new program for licensing its DRM patents for Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and Marlin Digital Rights Management (DRM) based consumer devices and software. The licensing program will also include patents from Sony and Philips, Intertrust's parent companies.
[For ]...mobile phones, consumer electronics devices, and personal computers for €0.25 per unit. Distributors of PC software applications with OMA and/or Marlin functionality are also entitled to an annual cap of €400,000 on the €0.25 per unit royalty.
Information Week is quoting Linux creator Linus Torvalds as saying that
In a posting on the Linux kernel mailing list, Torvalds said the Free Software Foundation's position on Tivoization is one reason he won't license his Linux kernel under GPLv3. "The GPLv3 doesn’t match what I think is morally where I want to be," Torvalds wrote. "I think it is okay to control people's hardware, I do it myself," he continued....
He accused the Free Software Foundation leadership, which includes eccentric, MIT-trained computing whiz Richard Stallman, of injecting their personal morality into the laws governing open source software with the release of GPLv3. "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate 'morality' with 'legality,' " Torvalds wrote.
Media Rights Technologies,which has patent pending technologies for securing streaming audio, has initiated another legal challenge. In a letter to the Library of Congress, MRT's outside counsel asks that certain statutory webcasting liceneses be revoked. The targets of this latest MRT initiative include AOL, Clear Channel , iTunes, Live 365, MSN Music, Napster, Pandora, RealNetworks, Rhapsody and Yahoo.
Continue reading "Media Rights Tech Says Revoke Webcasting Licenses" »
To say that the anti-Microsoft-Novell provisions of the draft GPLv3 are controversial is a major understatement. I asked Ed Walsh, an attorney at Wolf Greenfield & Sacks whose practice includes advising on issues relating to open source licensing, about paragraphs 4 and 5 of section 11 (Patents) of the GPLv3. Here's what Ed told me:
The anti-Microsoft/Novell clauses are different in kind than anything that has appeared before and require a new risk assessment. Rather than merely allocate rights, those clauses are intended to encourage active participation in disrupting an existing agreement and in general promote a boycott of buying patent licenses.
Those clauses flirt with conduct that would, in other contexts, be called "tortious interference with contract," "inducing infringement" and "an agreement in restraint of trade." Most for-profit companies would not allow their employees to make such agreements as part of a trade group or industry consortium, so the unintended, as well as the intended, consequences of these clauses should be given special attention.
As noted previously in this series, there are many other open source licenses that may be more appropriate than the GPLv3 in its current form. Anyone contemplating adopting GPLv3 should seek legal advise before doing so.
The latest discussion draft of the GNU General Public License has been strongly criticized for its position on the Microsoft-Novell deal in which Microsoft agreed not to assert whatever patent rights it might have. The Association for Competitive Technology has published white papers extremely critical of the new draft. These publications provide a legal analysis of the relevant portions of section 11 of the latest GPLv3 draft.
Richard Wilder and Noah Clements argue in GPLv3 is a Contract and Why it Matters that the GPLv3 draft contains provisions more like contract terms rather than provisions based on copyright law. Their detailed analysis is summed up this way:
Paragraph 4 of Section 11 is aimed squarely at Microsoft and states that a patent owner that grants a patent license that enables software covered by the GPLv3 to be used or conveyed is “automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it.”1 The FSF recognizes that the GPL had no direct influence on Microsoft as they would not “convey” a work covered by the GPL. That is, Microsoft is not threatened by the loss of a license under the GPL if they do not comply with its requirements. Accordingly, the FSF drafted Paragraph 4 to require the automatic grant of a license to all recipients of a covered work if they “convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work.” The flaw in this provision is two-fold. First, Paragraph 4 is a contract term, not a license term. Because Microsoft and companies like them are not parties to the contract, they are not bound by it. Second, while aiming at Microsoft and the Microsoft-Novell agreement, the FSF has hit a much broader target that threatens the ability of the proprietary and open source communities to work together productively.
Those interested in the details and the specifics of their analysis can read the paper (6 pages).
I asked Ed Walsh, an attorney whose specialties include open source software licensing, about current discussion draft of the GPLv3 license. Ed is an attorney with well-respected IP law firm Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks. Here's what he told me:
A summary of the way this draft balances concerns of competing constituencies can be found in the words of the drafters themselves, who state:
“Software patenting is a harmful and unjust policy, and should be abolished.”
With this philosophical bent clearly evident, it is hard to detect anything that should make businesses that own patents more comfortable about using software covered by the GPL. Rather, it should raise concerns that GPL licensed code is incompatible with objectives of for-profit business, or at the least trigger an awareness that the rules of Open Source have changed and it is time to re-evaluate both decisions whether to use open source and practices around how it will be used.
The suggestion that the requirement to grant patent licenses has been limited by a "contribution based licensing" is misleading because "contributions" are defined in GPLv3 to include the entire work, unless the work conveyed is a verbatim copy of a work made by someone else. Anyone who obtains a copy of the program or any portion of it is licensed. The license even applies to patents not in existence or owned when the work is conveyed. Further, new definitions of a "covered work" and "conveyance" expand the reach of the GPL beyond software or software distribution and likewise expand the situations in which a patent license must be granted.
If the current draft becomes final without significant changes in section 11 (Patents), inventors, entrepreneurs, investors, and other interested parties should be wary of relying on GPLv3. There are, of course, other open source licenses besides the GPL, and concerned parties should probably evaluate these licenses as well if open source is a part of their business strategy.
Back in January, Ed gave a presentation on Open Source Software: Issues for Start-ups to the Boston Entrepreneurs' Network that surveys the kinds of issues that should be taken into account. For the avoidance of doubt, this presentation had in mind GPLv2, and not the current v3 draft.
The Register (UK) reports that Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame has endorsed DRM, or at least Sun's open source DRM efforts, the Open Media Commons. The endorsement is in a press release announcing release of code and specifications for OMC DRM. The release quotes Lessig:
Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School: "In a world where DRM has become ubiquitous, we need to ensure that the ecology for creativity is bolstered, not stifled, by technology. We applaud Sun's efforts to rally the community around the development of open-source, royalty-free DRM standards that support "fair use" and that don't block the development of Creative Commons ideals."
However, Lessig strongly qualifies this assertion here.
The Register (UK) has an article reporting a licensing scheme for those podcasting music involving The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) and the Performing Right Society (PRS). In addition to a licensing fee, the agreement itemizes detailed requirements and prohibitions. Podcasters will be obliged not to:
Digimarc announced today that Thomson (the European-based electronics company) has licensed Dagmar IP relating to watermarking. Terms were not announced. Digimarc says that it has "an extensive intellectual property portfolio, with more than 200 issued U.S. patents including more than 4,000 claims, and more than 400 pending patent applications in digital watermarking, personal identification and related technologies." It's unclear what proportion deal with watermarking.
Gavin Clarke's useful article in The Register describes the process the Free Software Foundation intends to use in revising the GNU General Public License. Snippets:
Corbis has announced a distribution deal with the European Pressphoto Agency that will leverage Corbis' licensing and rights management capabilities. Snippet:
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