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Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
book

Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law

by Lawrence Rosen
July 2004
Intermediate to advanced
432 pages
8h 12m
English
Pearson
Content preview from Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law

Disputes over Derivative Works

I left for last the most difficult legal question facing the open source software industry: What is a “derivative work” of software?

If an open source license doesn't have a reciprocity condition, derivative works simply don't cause problems. You can safely ignore this topic entirely if you license software under an academic open source license.

Early in this book I explained the complex problem of separating expressions from ideas, art from science, and right brain from left brain creations. To determine whether a software program is a derivative work of another software program, the courts need to disentangle these abstractions. The procedure that many courts use, called the abstraction-filtration-comparison

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0131487876Purchase book