The Implications of Incumbent Intellectual Property Strategies for Open Source Software Success and Commercialization

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen Wen
2008 ◽  
pp. 3777-3805
Author(s):  
Bernd Carsten Stahl

This chapter discusses the impact that open source software has on our perception and use of intellectual property. The theoretical foundation of the paper is constructionist in that it holds intellectual property to be a social construction that is created and legitimized by narratives. In a first step, the chapter recounts the narratives that are usually found in the literature to justify the creation and protection of intellectual property. The two most important streams of narratives are the utilitarian and the natural rights arguments. In a second step, the paper proceeds to the impact that the use of information and communication technology (ICT) has on the narratives of intellectual property. From there, the chapter progresses to a discussion of the impact of open source software on these narratives. It will be argued that open source software changes our perception of intellectual property because it offers evidence that some of the classical narratives are simplistic. At the same time it will become clear that open source is not a frontal assault on intellectual property because it is partly based on ownership of intellectual artefacts. The conclusion discusses how this change of narratives caused by open source software may reflect on our institutions, laws, and regulations of intellectual property.


2012 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 364-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravi Sen ◽  
Siddhartha S. Singh ◽  
Sharad Borle

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (21) ◽  
pp. 12270
Author(s):  
Martin Fredriksson

This article engages with the resistance against the global erosion of seed diversity following the modernization and industrialization of agriculture over the 20th century. This resistance spans from local farming communities that preserve and safeguard traditional landraces to international movements which oppose proprietary seed regulations and promote free sharing of seeds. The article focuses on the latter and presents a study of the open source seed movement: an initiative to apply strategies from the open source software movement to ensure the free circulation of seeds. The erosion of seed diversity can be seen not only as a loss of genetic diversity but also a memory loss where traditional, collective knowledge about how to grow certain landraces is forgotten. Consequently, the open source seed movement is not only about saving seeds but also about preserving and revitalizing local and traditional ecological knowledge against privatization and enclosure through intellectual property rights. The aim of this article is, thus, to analyze the open source seed movement as an act of revitalization in relation to intellectual property rights and in the context of information politics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-196
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Żok

Free and open source software (FOSS) has undoubtedly become an important element of intellectual property law. It is therefore not surprising that the European Commission developed its own non-proprietary licence, i.e. the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). The article examines the reference to ‘a work of software’ to determine the scope of the licence. For this purpose, the paper discusses the reasons for the creation of the EUPL, the relationship between a work and software as well as the structure of a computer program. The following considerations also include the compatible licences listed in the EUPL Appendix. The article concludes that the reference to a work or software is not accidental because it removes serious doubts arising from the concept of a computer program. Thus, this legal solution may facilitate the wider adoption of the licence.


Author(s):  
Stewart T. Fleming

The open source software movement exists as a loose collection of individuals, organizations, and philosophies roughly grouped under the intent of making software source code as widely available as possible (Raymond, 1998). While the movement as such can trace its roots back more than 30 years to the development of academic software, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and so forth, the popularization of the movement grew significantly from the mid-80s (Naughton, 2000).


Author(s):  
Chitu Okoli ◽  
Kevin Carillo

Intellectual property is an old concept, with the first recorded instances of patents (1449) and copyrights (1662) both occurring in England (“Intellectual property”, Wikipedia, 2004). The first piece of software was submitted for copyright to the United States Copyright Office in 1961, and was accepted as copyrightable under existing copyright law (Hollaar, 2002). The open source movement has relied upon controversial intellectual property rights that are rooted in the overall history of software development (Lerner & Tirole, 2002; von Hippel & von Krogh, 2003). By defining specific legal mechanisms and designing various software licenses, the open source phenomenon has successfully proposed an alternative software development model whose approach to the concept of intellectual property is quite different from that taken by traditional proprietary software. A separate article in this encyclopedia treats open source software communities in general as a type of virtual community. This article takes a historical approach to examining how the intellectual property rights that have protected free/open source software have contributed towards the formation and evolution of virtual communities whose central focus is software projects based on the open source model.


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