Disclaimer: I hate lawyers, laws and judges. I think the whole legal system is built specifically to be complicated because, c'mon, life is not
that complicated by itself. Everything is slow, language is really tricky, you have to go to a thousand different places to do anything...
Yes, let's better hire lawyers an let them take care of it. But it doesn't matter how much we hate laws or Intellectual Property (IP), they are here to stay and they rule everything we do.
So, when I read
this review on Slashdot about the book
Intellectual Property and Open Source, I thought I'd give it a go. I thought: "let's get better on what I hate the most".
It's kind of ironic that the book starts with IAAL (I am a layer) but very quickly says something like "whatever is written here shouldn't be taken for granted, go and check with your lawyer" which is exactly the same warning all the
IANAL statements begin with.
The first part of the book gives a background about where IP comes from and why it's good (or was meant to be good) for society. It also covers differences between patents, copyright, trademarks, trade secrets and all the legal terminology crap.
Then continues with examples such as:
* If you write code for a company, who owns the rights of that code, you or the company?
* If you write your own project that has nothing to do with your current job, could your company claim compensation?
You would be surprised with
actual cases and how they ended up. I haven't even finished the book yet and I'm sure I'm going to find even more interesting stuff.
So, copyright, lawyers, laws and all the crew aren't going to go away just because we don't like them. Let's try to learn how to use them in own our benefit.
Cheers!
ps: Grant Skinner wrote not long ago a very interesting post about
licensing source code, give it a read and also to the comments. Interesting stuff.