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Open-source license compliance is a sensitive topic. Lawyers and technicians have devoted endless hours, lengthy blog postings and much mental energy to questions like, "What is a derivative work?" and "What is distribution?" ...

It is not surprising that some of the most significant changes in the new version of the GPL relate to patent law, according to Heather J. Meeker, intellectual property attorney and shareholder in the Silicon Valley office of Greenberg Traurig "Many members of the free-softwar...

Heather J. Meeker, intellectual property attorney and partner in the Silicon Valley office of Greenberg Traurig LLP, told LinuxInsider that many hoped that the language of the GPL would be clarified, but this seems unlikely "The one most widely anticipated change is a new trea...

I have received many responses to my previous columns for LinuxInsider, and though I took a breather from columns for the summer, I wanted to follow up on a couple of the responses ...

People often ask me how likely it is that an open-source license like the GNU General Public License will ever be enforced. When they ask that, they usually mean: "If I violate it will I get caught?" It's a legitimate question, if one lays aside moral rhetoric, such as the idea that proprietary software companies are merely evil capitalist agents seeking to abuse the rights of free software developers...

In the mid 1990s, when I first began running into open source in my practice, I noticed that open source had a very strange effect on intellectual property lawyers. It was a Chicken Little situation, but instead of crying "the sky is falling" they were crying "the code is infringing." ...

The press reported a few weeks ago that SCO, the UnixWare purveyor famous for bringing Linux-related lawsuits against IBM and others, was in danger of being delisted from the NASDAQ. This announcement was surprising because most public companies don't risk delisting for not filing their 10-K's. But this is only the end of a series of announcements related to the Utah company's financial woes...

The European Commission recently tolled the death knell for the EU Software Patent Directive, or more precisely, the "Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions." ...