Legal Webinars
Navigating the Complexities of the GPL Family of Licenses
Join us for an in-depth look at the GPL family of licenses.
With more than half of the 1,000,000+ open source projects available on the Internet using GPL licenses (GPL, LGPL and AGPL), they are the most widely used open source licenses in the world. Many open source savvy companies integrate extremely valuable software made available under these licenses into their development environments and internal operations, as well as their outbound products and services, with confidence.
In the webinar, we will discuss the policies and processes that are in place at these companies to enable the intelligent use of GPL-licensed code and the analysis that these companies use to determine the scope of the source code sharing obligations under these licenses. We will explore the concept of a what constitutes a separate and independent work to which the sharing obligations would not apply, as well as the most common assumptions regarding distribution or conveyance as a trigger for the sharing obligations under GPL versions 2 or 3 respectively.
To gain insight into these issues and to learn practical approaches for addressing them, please join Black Duck with Karen Copenhaver (Choate, Hall and Stewart) and Mark Radcliffe (DLA Piper), two of the software industry’s most prominent open source IP lawyers and domain experts with the GPL.
Balancing IP Concerns with the Benefits of FOSS Community Participation
Increasingly, businesses are looking to leverage open source communities to improve how they develop software, but many struggle with underlying legal concerns. The dilemma many organizations face is how to allow employees to contribute to open source projects, while still protecting their intellectual property. In this webinar, leading legal experts, Karen Copenhaver and Mark Radcliffe, will provide guidelines to help your company encourage FOSS participation while mitigating IP concerns.
Attendees of this webinar will learn:
- The business benefits from participation in the open source communities
- How to put contribution agreements in place
- Best practices for effective FOSS participation
Join Karen Copenhaver, Partner at Choate Hall & Stewart, and Counsel for the Linux Foundation, and Mark Radcliffe, Partner at DLA Piper and General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for insights into this important topic.
Top Open Source Legal Developments in 2012
This annual review will highlight the most significant legal developments related to open source software in 2012, including:
- Clarifications around the globe on copyrightable subject matter
- Patent litigation related to open source software
- Government use of open source
- Competing trends on how project licensing information is (or isn't) presented
- Compliance programs in the community and in the enterprise
- and much more!
Gain insights into these important legal developments from two of the leading open source legal experts, Karen Copenhaver, Partner at Choate Hall & Stewart and Counsel for the Linux Foundation, and Mark Radcliffe, Partner at DLA Piper and General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
Achieving Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise
IDC recently reported that “open source makes up 30% or more of the code at major Global 2000 organizations and is increasingly looked to as a resource.” Technology trends in cloud computing and mobilization, key areas of IT investment in 2013, are driving the adoption and reliance on open source. But as open source software is more broadly used, IT organizations are struggling to manage, control and ensure compliance. In an environment where development organizations are under intense pressure to keep pace in competitive markets, a lack of formal policies and ad hoc management practices are insufficient in making sure license obligations are met.
The need to ensure compliance is also being reinforced by the growth in adoption of open source projects using the AGPL license, which closes the distribution loophole associated with the GPL license. At the same time, enterprises creating and distributing mobile apps are becoming more like ISVs, the early adopters of open source compliance processes, and therefore need to proactively manage and control open source.
Webinar attendees will learn:
- Compliance challenges associated with unmanaged open source use
- Five steps to realize the economic, competitive and risk-mitigating benefits of a pro-active approach to open source compliance
Join Karen Copenhaver, Partner at Choate Hall & Stewart, and Counsel for the Linux Foundation, and Mark Radcliffe, Partner at DLA Piper and General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for an informative discussion on this topic.
The Invisible Software Supply Chain and Open Source Compliance
Software is "invisible," making it difficult to track and control, and is rarely subject to the rigorous supply chain management systems employed for hardware. The lack of visibility and control, combined with the ease of embedding software components with a simple "copy and paste," presents significant challenges to ensuring compliance and creates management risks. In fact, Gartner Group reports that by 2014, 50% of Global 2000 organizations will experience technology, cost and challenges due to a lack of open source governance. As the use of open source software (OSS) by development organizations grows both inside the enterprise and outside (by outsourcers and suppliers), gaining control of your company's software supply chain is now a management priority.
During this webinar, you will learn:
- What a software supply chain is
- What the compliance challenges are with OSS
- How to protect your company
- The role of standards like SPDX
Join presenters Karen Copenhaver, Partner at Choate Hall & Stewart, and Counsel for the Linux Foundation, and Mark Radcliffe, Partner at DLA Piper and General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for an informative discussion on this topic.
How to Go Open: Successfully Open Sourcing Internal Software Projects
More and more commercial organizations are looking to participate directly in open source communities and are evaluating how to convert proprietary internal projects into open source community-based projects.
Topics covered include:
- Deciding to Release
- Choosing the License (GPLv2, GPLv3, Apache, etc)
- Reviewing Code Prior to Release
- Building Your Community
- Managing Contributions
In this webinar, Karen Copenhaver, Partner at Choate, Hall and Stewart, and Mark Radcliffe, Partner at DLA Piper, highlight key business and legal considerations and share best practices related to this process. Erynn Petersen, SVP of Paid Services and Open Source Engineering at AOL, joins them to share her corporate experience with moving projects into the open source community.
Introduction to Open Source
Open source software is an important part of mainstream software development organizations. As Mark Driver, Gartner Group’s lead analyst for open source, says: “Open source is ubiquitous, it’s unavoidable….having a policy against open source is impractical and places you at a competitive disadvantage.” And yet even as it has become mainstream, open source software is often misunderstood by developers and lawyers alike.
In this webinar, two of the industry’s legal heavyweights, Karen Copenhaver, Partner at Choate Hall & Stewart, and Counsel for the Linux Foundation, and Mark Radcliffe, Partner at DLA Piper, and General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI) will discuss:
- The history and definition of open source
- The legal framework related to this type of intellectual property
- The most popular attribution licenses (BSD, MIT and Apache) and their obligations