27 2013 o fair use or theft rodney aschers room 237

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Fair Use or Theft?: Rodney Ascher's 'Room 237' vs. Warner Bros.' 'The Shining' (IndieWire, Sept.
13, 2012)
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Why the Google Book Settlement Failed -- and What Comes Next? (University of Berkeley, Nov.
2011)
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An Exhibition that Borrows Brazenly (The New York Times, Jan. 7, 2003)
P A T E N T S
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Big Tech Winning Battle with 'Patent Trolls' (Reuters, Oct. 22, 2014)
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Deadmau5 Accuses Disney of Copyright Infringement (The Toronto Star, Sept. 6, 2014)
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Appeals Court Tosses $368M Patent Judgment Against Apple (ComputerWorld, Sept. 16, 2014)
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Justices Seem Wary of Software Patent Case (The New York Times, April 1, 2014)
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Apple Did Not Violate Google Patent, says U.S. appeals court (The New York Times, Jan. 10,
2014)
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Tech Giants Fear Spread of Patent Wars to Europe (The New York Times, Sept. 25, 2013)
IN THE NEWS

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© University of Waterloo and others
I P P R O T E C T I O N O F S O F T W A R E – L U I S V I L L A , G E N E R A L C O U N S E L ,
W I K I M E D I A F O U N D A T I O N
M y name is Luis Villa. I’m a lawyer, former software developer, and currently a director of the Open
Source Initiative, the group that defines and certifies open source licencing.
I’m going to talk about open source licences. But, before we talk about free and open source licencing in
specific, let’s back up a little bit and talk more generally about intellectual property in the software
industry.
You’ve probably heard about copyright and patents, but what are they in our context? Generally
speaking, copyright is a part of the law that protects specific creative works . All software source code
other than the most trivial patches is copyrightable under the law of Canada, the US and the EU.
Copyright covers the specific way that you’ve written a particul ar program - what lawyers call the
“expression” of the source code. It does not cover the idea behind the program .
F or example, in the context of a book, Margaret Atwood can copyright the “Blind Assassin”, but she
can’t copyright the idea of a book within a book or the idea of historical fiction. In software, this means
that I can copyright the source code for a particular implementation of a calculator, but I can’t copyright
the idea of a calculator.
In contrast, patents do protect general ideas - innovative solutions to technical problems. Unlike
copyrights, they can’t protect a general idea. If I had a patent on copyrights , then you wouldn’t be able
to write any calculator regardless of the specific source code that you use to implement it.
In contrast, copyright only protects that particular version of the source code that I use . Unlike
copyright, which is granted the moment you create or write a piece of code, patent must be submitted
and vetted by a government agency. Because of that, all software is copyrighted but not all software is
patented. So, we’ll focus mostly on copyrights here.