How copyrights and patents work, for engineers
Just as a heads up to anyone who cares, I’ll be giving a talk at OSCON this year entitled “Dispelling legal myths: Things OSS developers get wrong about the law”.
After talking with some folks about the best way to present this, it will end up being a basic overview of how lawsuits, copyrights and patents actually work in the US legal system. My purpose here is not to espouse views on these things, but instead transfer knowledge of how it all works, in the hopes of reducing ignorance of the “way things are now” among engineers, and in particular, OSS folks.
- For the legal system in general
- How our legal system is broken up at the federal level
- Anatomy of a lawsuit
- Costs of a lawsuit
- General rules of interpretation of statutes and laws (possibly, depends on time)
- For Copyright
- What is copyrightable
- What the actual copy rights involved are
- Fair use
- How infringements of these rights are determined by courts (IE tests used, etc)
- For Patents
- What is patentable
- What the actual rights granted by patents are
- How patents are examined
- How prior art is used
- How courts determine validity of patents
- How courts determine infringement of patents
I only have a limited amount of time to go into this stuff, so I plan on focusing particularly on software. Anyone who knows copyright knows that most people don’t realize how complicated the rights around things like performances and sound recordings are. Rather than dumb things down, I’ve tried to explain enough of the underlying principles and situations that one could at least come up with reasonable answers given a more complicated situation.
If you have ever taken a course on IP law, copyrights, or patents, you will likely be very bored at this presentation 
Though I may also get into contracts, licensing, and EULA’s.
Of course, I’m happy to answer questions about my views, or about pretty much anything legal while I’m around. So if you plan on being there, please bring all the questions you’ve got. I’ve got all the time in the world to answer them.
June 25th, 2007 at 8:22 am
I’ve considered giving a similar talk at a couple conferences; would love to get my hands on these slides as a starting point if/when they are done.