Book Review: "Intellectual Property and Open Source"
You'd have to do a lot of man-on-the-street interviews before you'd find someone who could explain the difference between a patent and a trademark. And even the relatively savvy participants in the Ars forums have been known to mangle copyright's fair use doctrine, misunderstand key provisions of the GPL, or foolishly assume that the law must track their own notions of common sense.
Yet the complex and esoteric legal regimes collectively known as "intellectual property"—copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets—have never been more important in the lives of software developers. Failure to understand the implications of key legal documents can prevent programmers from doing their jobs and enjoying the fruits of their labor. And because the free software community has learned to leverage the power of copyright law to protect end-users' freedom, understanding copyright law is especially important to developers of free software.
There are plenty of books that make policy arguments about how copyright or patent law ought to be changed. But there are few books that help the reader understand the current state of the law. Too often, a programmer who wants to understand the "rules of the road" with regard to copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets has to either wade through hundreds of pages of dense legalese, or pay a lawyer hundreds of dollars an hour to explain it to him.
Into this void steps Van Lindberg, a former software engineer and now a lawyer who specializes in the legal issues surrounding the free software community. Lindberg starts with the basics, explaining how copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets work. He then dives into the details that are most likely to be of interest to software developers: employment agreements, software licenses, copyleft, reverse engineering, and formalizing a project by creating a non-profit organization. No book could replace the advice of competent legal counsel, but reading Intellectual Property and Open Source from cover to cover will give the average free software developer a clear understanding of the legal terrain she will have to navigate as she creates, improves, or uses free software.
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