IP Food for Thought

Out of Town But Not Out of It

We're at the Gartner Open Source Summit this week. The first day is Thursday, December 7, so will try to log on tomorrow night and provide any interesting updates.

We Try Our Best

We constantly talk and work with other companies to help them manage their third-party IP and the best practices around creating an IP Ingredients report. And at ipingredients.org, we eat our own dog food as well. We recently ran an IP Ingredients report for one of our own products. And during that process, we found a third-party product we knew were using, and dutifully listed the product and its license on our report. We also took it one step further and ran an IP Ingredients report for all the third-party code and licenses that was inside that product. [Does that make that fourth-party code?]. Interestingly, we found a license for that fourth-party code that our lawyers had a question about. There was nothing wrong with the terms of the license itself. The question our attorneys raised was based on the fact that they did not believe that the third-party product company had the authority to pass on that license to us, meaning that they could not accept that license on our behalf. So trying to practice what we preach, we went to the other vendor's web site, downloaded that fourth party code independently and accepted the terms of the license directly. So now we have a direct license with the fourth-party company, so that there is no confusion about our responsibilities surrounding the use of their code.

This little example proves to us that every company has responsibility for all the code and licenses in their code base, no matter how they received it. It also reminded us that a company's IP policy should be one that is constantly keeping up to date with the changes in its products....

Sony's Cooking Up a Storm

A lot has already been said about Sony BMG's recent DRM problems. And of course, a couple of weeks it ago, it was discovered that they may be violating the LGPL license because they included LAME code in the product as well.

According to multiple tech media sources, it is supposedly a problem with First4Internet, a British company that designed the DRM software for Sony, as they were the ones who included the code into the product. The allegation that they are violating the LGPL license stems from the fact that if you use LGPL'd code, you must acknowledge the source and use of it and that you can provide the source code upon request.

Need we say it? We, of course, think this is exactly why companies should have IP Ingredient labels for their software. This is the perfect example how the labels could have been helpful to this entire value chain.

It's not just to help customers determine what's in the code they are purchasing, it's so that the software vendors themselves can ensure that they are meeting all of the legal and business requirements of the third-party licenses they are using...