Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code

Any outside the field of IT who want to understand how to handle the legal system will find Intellectual Property and Open Source is perfect for understanding how law views intellectual property rights for programmers. The author's an attorney who is also a programmer, so chapters address concerns of all sides, from pursuing ideas while working for another to reverse engineering a project, handling trade secrets, and more. Both computer and legal libraries strong in technology need this.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The initial chapters were a bit dry due to their subject matter: patents, copyright, trade secrets, etc. The author did a great job of keeping your interest by using concepts familiar to programmers to explain these subjects. For example using the constructs of regular expressions and try/catch blocks to explain the reasoning behind patent language.
I was convinced the author was someone I could relate to when in the chapter on trade secrets, he used the 'Flaming Moe' as one of his examples of trade secret calamities.
Once you are through the initial chapters, you are on a good footing for understanding the Open Source licenses presented in the later chapters from a legal perspective. In these chapters, Van is able to dispel myths and misconceptions since the reader has done their 'legal homework' in the beginning of the book.

This book is an excellent resource for anyone involved in technology products. It is a first class primer on intellectual property and uses examples familiar to technical people. There is unavoidable legal discussions but they are presented in a manner that makes it easy to understand.

Anyone in a technology oriented field, especially the computer industry, should read this book.

As a software developer, it's almost a certainty that you either participate in or use open source software somewhere in your computing environment. But even though you may have the source code sitting in front of you, it doesn't mean you can anything you darn well please with it. Van Lindberg's book Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code does a very good job in presenting the intricacies of open source licensing in a way that won't automatically put a developer to sleep. Granted, there's still a lot of legal concepts to wade through, but in my opinion he hit the right mix between legalities and practicalities.

Contents: The Economic and Legal Foundations of Intellectual Property; The Patent Document; The Patent System; Copyright; Trademarks; Trade Secrets; Contracts and Licenses; The Economic and Legal Foundations of Open Source Software; So I Have An Idea...; Choosing A License; Accepting Patches and Contributions; Working With The GPL; Reverse Engineering; Incorporating As A Non-Profit
Appendices: Sample Proprietary Information Agreement (PIA); Open Source License List; Free Software License List; Fedora License List and GPL Compatibility; Public Domain Declaration; The Simplified BSD License; The Apache License, Version 2.0; The Mozilla Public License, Version 1.1; The GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1; The GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 3; The GNU General Public License, Version 2, June 1991; The GNU General Public License, Version 3, June 2007; The Open Software License, Version 3.0
Index

Lindberg accomplishes a couple of purposes in this book. The first few chapters trace the history and general concepts of intellectual property law, such as patents and trade secrets. This is necessary, in that it lays the groundwork to be able to understand what part of your work may or may not be covered by intellectual property laws. While there are plenty of legal concepts and examples cited, he doesn't get so far down into the weeds as to make the material irrelevant to the target audience... technology professionals. The last half of the book then uses that foundation to talk specifically about open source software, licenses, and legal issues being faced today. And really, it's more complex than you'd think (but isn't *anything* legal overly complex?) Each of the licenses he covers has certain advantages and disadvantages that can make a significant impact on how you and others can use your software going forward. For instance, one license may allow the user to use it in any way they see fit, including using it in their own non-open source software. Other licenses actually force any software project using the open source code to also be bound by the same license, meaning that your work has to be made available in open source form to others. Based on what you plan on building and how you want to market it, this could make the difference between a thriving business or a ruinous lawsuit. And again, the writing is appropriate for the technology professional, not four year law students looking to become a partner and retire by the age of 40.

For anyone involved in creating an open-source project (or what they *think* an open source project should be), this should be essential reading. And if you've ever downloaded something from Sourceforge to include in one of your own projects, you also need to read this to clearly understand your rights and obligations. I know we techies would prefer to let other people figure out the legal stuff, but it's not worth it to have your next killer application idea bankrupt you in court...

The author is both a programmer and a lawyer. That combination means that this is the ideal book for programmers as he regularly uses programming concepts to illustrate legal issues.

I really enjoyed this. The writing style is clear and very readable while imparting a lot of knowledge. I particularly enjoyed the explanation of patent details and that he used a real patent (Amazon's 1-click) as the example. I also liked the explanations of the strengths and weaknesses of the various open source licensing options.

There's a lot more here: advice for employees and budding entrepreneurs , reverse engineering (with multiple examples of real life projects) and more.