To avoid legal difficulties when managing intellectual property for open source projects, more tech savvy lawyers are needed, according to the Linux Foundation.
Educating lawyers, however, is not the only solution, argued other open source insiders at the LinuxCon Europe conference in Edinburgh this week.
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Open source software adoption is outstripping the legal knowledge of parties involved in open source projects who have difficulty dealing with copyright, patent, licensing and compliance issues, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. During the conference's opening speech on Monday, Zemlin said the open source community needs more lawyers who have an understanding of the technology and how open source collaboration works.
Having lawyers with a better understanding of the technology involved in open source projects would indeed be a way to overcome legal difficulties, said Deb Nicholson, community outreach director of the OIN (Open Innovation Network).
"I would agree that having more tech savvy lawyers that understand open source legal issues would be good," Nicholson said. "Smaller companies are desperate to find someone who can advise them," she said, adding that even if they can pay them, finding an attorney who understands the issues can be difficult.
The problem is that most free and open source software projects are becoming more legally complicated, said Catharina Maracke, a lawyer and associate professor at Keio University, in Japan, who focuses on intellectual property law and policy as well as standardization efforts for public licensing plans.
For one thing, open source projects often call for separate agreements for copyrights and patents, Maracke said. Copyright and patent issues are different, and this can cause communication problems for developers and lawyers negotiating related agreements.
Being a lawyer with a consulting practice herself, Maracke sometimes has trouble understanding what developers try to tell her, while there are similar problems the other way around, she said.
This lack of understanding can lead to friction between parties who are trying to manage intellectual property for open source projects, and protracted negotiations can drive up the legal costs, Maracke said.
Educating lawyers isn't the only option, though. To bridge the gap, standardization of legal terms could also be an important step, Maracke said.
While public licenses such asCreative Commons, the GNU General Public License or other free and open source software licenses have emerged as relatively easy-to-use standardized copyright agreements, more work can be done to make licensing easier, according to Maracke.
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