#FOSSBack: McCoy Smith – Project Ownership & Project Enforcement: The Rules, They Are A-Changing
Channel: Plain Schwarz
Date: 2022-04-04

Slides and Speaker profile: https://pretalx.com/foss-backstage-2022/talk/HTXKJA/

For almost 40 years, open source software projects have been developed using several different models for allocating project intellectual ownership rights. At one extreme, all contributors are required to assign their IP rights to the project itself. At the other extreme, every contributor retains all their IP rights, and only grants rights to that IP according to the license of the project. There have been various arguments over the years over which model is optimal, both for project health and for other activities like relicensing or license changes, and enforcement against license violators.
Recent trends seem to indicate a consensus toward how to best allocate IP rights in an open source project; the best example of how things are changing is announcements by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that it will be changing the rules for some of the GNU projects it maintains -- upending decades of practices by one of the original open source project hosts.
At the same time, there have been notable developments in the ways in which open source projects have pursued entities accused of not following the terms of the license for those projects. These litigations have been pursued both in Germany (the various McHardy enforcement litigations; Hellwig vs. VMWare) as well as a brand-new enforcement action in the USA, Software Freedom Conservancy vs. Vizio. Each of these litigations have altered the way license compliance violations have been addressed, and each either has, or may, alter the way that projects think about issues like IP ownership and IP enforcement.
This presentation will discuss all of these recent developments, and set forth some predictions for what the further might be for how open source projects maintain, and protect, the IP rights in their software.

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