Free Republic

"I am puzzled as to why this might be thought a newsworthy story at all," says Richard Fontana, talking about his new licensing project, Copyleft.next (formerly, GPL.next). "Copyleft.next is just a toy research project, motivated initially by a mere desire on my part to learn more about using Git."Fontana is perhaps being mildly disingenuous. Although the importance of Copyleft.next has been greatly exaggerated, he is not ruling out the possibility that it might play a role in the development of future versions of copyleft licenses such as the GPL family of licenses.If nothing else, the project seems to reflect the...

A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States...

WASHINGTON -- The rights to George Orwell's novel 1984 -- the inspiration for an Apple computer ad pirated by a Barack Obama supporter who remodeled it into an attack on Hillary Rodham Clinton -- are owned by Gina Rosenblum, a West Rogers Park resident who is president of Rosenblum Productions Inc. A reason Apple probably did not complain about the Orwellian spot appropriated by Philip de Vellis -- a Democratic political operative -- is that the company didn't have the right to use it in the first place. It ran only during the 1984 Super Bowl because Rosenblum sent a...