How to Protect Your Open Source Code from Theft and a Mercurial Hook to Help

2010-01-15T10:27:18-08:00

Updated, 2010-01-24: Some edits regarding the Affero license (thanks to Brian at http://cyberlawcases.com for the corrections).

I’ve finally begun doing some of the actual coding for my final project so the time has come to set up a mercurial repository to hold the code.

Once we complete our project, we will have built a free product that competes with some of the core functionality of both LexisNexis and Westlaw, so something we wanted to do was make sure they couldn’t steal our code, enhance their product and thus moot ours.

To achieve this, we’re using the GNU Affero General Public License v3, which allows people to take our code for free, but requires that they publicly share any modifications that they make to the code. The normal GNU General Public License allows the code to be used at no cost, but only requires that changes to the code be shared with the public if one distributes the changed version to the public. With a server-based project, like ours, one could operate modified versions of the code without ever having a need to distribute any of the software to the public. This loophole is closed by the Affero license.

In order to license our work, we must be its copyright holder. This is easy enough, since we get copyright instantly in the U.S., but, as has been demonstrated in Jacobsen v. Katzer, in order to seek remedies for copyright violations, we would have to register everything we made with the copyright office. This costs $35 per registration, and with open source software, it’s not clear whether each and every version needs to be registered or just major releases, or what.

Since this is too onerous to be practical, an additional approach to protecting our works is useful, and in the DMCA (17 U.S.C.§ 506(d)), remedies are provided for the “fraudulent removal of copyright notice.” Although these do not (in any way) match the protections provided by normal copyright registration, they are a useful place to begin. Thus, if we place a copyright notice into each file of our code, those using our code must either risk violating the DMCA by removing these notices, or leave our copyright information intact. (Placing such notices in each file is also the recommendation of the Free Software Foundation.)

To place our information into each and every file of code that we upload publicly, I wrote a short mercurial hook that adds copyright and licensing information it to the top of every file that is modified or added to the repository. To use the script, simply make it executable, place it in the .hg directory of your project, and add the following lines to .hg/hgrc:

[hooks]
pretxncommit = .hg/checklicense.py

A couple of things I should note about this script is that it currently only checks for java and python files, and that it requires files called java_license.txt and python_license.txt to be in the root of your repository. It should be fairly easy to modify though to fit your own needs.

Jacobsen v. Katzer Article Posted

2009-10-03T21:52:21-07:00

Today I finally finished an article I have been writing for Wikipedia, as part of my IP Law class. The professor for this class is the same as the one that taught the Cyberlaw class I took in the Spring, and once again, he has asked us to work on Wikipedia as part of our classwork.

We were able to choose an article on Wikipedia that was related to the class, and I chose to work on the article on Jacobsen v. Katzer, which is a very important case as it relates to open source licensing, patent law, copyright, DMCA, and just about every other possible IP law issue.

Ultimately, it was a very complicated case because Katzer has attempted to throw the book at Jacobsen (and vice versa). The court has not yet resolved all the issues, but from reading through about half of the court documents that Jacobsen has posted, it appears that Katzer has:

Patented technology that was not his to patent
Attempted to get licensing fees from Jacobsen for those patents
Stolen the intellectual property of an open source project, stripped it of its license and then incorporated it into his own commercial project
Attempted to sue Jacobsen for copyright violation for something - I’m not even sure what
And more - see the article for details

In short, it’s a nasty, nasty case, but ultimately it should work out for Jacobsen, and he should come out the better (or at least none the worse). At a minimum, he has to prove that the patents are invalid, Katzer stole his IP, and that he didn’t steal Katzer’s IP - a walk in the park.

Clearly, that’s easier said than done, but he’s fighting what appears to be the good fight, and it looks like if he keeps at it, he will win in the end.

Michael Jay Lissner

How to Protect Your Open Source Code from Theft and a Mercurial Hook to Help

Jacobsen v. Katzer Article Posted