VISHWAK 360

SOFTWARE LICENSING 101

MAY 2011

IPR – LEGAL MUMBO JUMBO

Kinds of Property

Jure in re aliena

Leases Servitudes Securities. Etc.

Jura in re propria

Immaterial things

Patents, Copyrights,

Trade-Marks, etc.

Material Things

Land, ChattelsIncorporeal property

Corporeal property

“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet."  

--  Mark Twain

REASONS FOR COPYRIGHT• Recognition for the work done by the author

• Rewarding them for the work

• Giving them Exclusive Rights for the work

PATENT - HOW IT WORKS?

Inventor

Patent office

Public

1) Applie

s to G

overnment

2) Grants

Patent

3) Viewing rights to Public

BASIC REQUIREMENTS FOR PATENT• It should be new

• It should be useful

• Non - obvious

WHAT IS TRADEMARK?

• Visual symbol

• Word or Device

• Label applied to articles of commerce

• Introducing the goods to the society

LICENSES• Transfers rights without ownership

• Rights transferred can be

• Copyright• Patent• Trademark• Trade secret

SOFTWARE LICENSES• MIT

• Free BSD

• Apache

• GPL / LGPL – General Public License

• MS-PL

• Commercial Licenses – Windows 98 or EasyStruct

COMMON MYTH• There is no compulsion to release changes that you make,

either under the GPL or any other open source license

• You may keep internal versions of GPL software that you have modified without necessarily licensing them to anyone else (Google)

REFERENCES

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

http://creativecommons.org/

FLICKR SAMPLE