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Landmark software patent case settled

By Alex Handy

February 25, 2010 — (Page 1 of 3)
What was likely the most contentious court case in the history of model railroading wound down to an anticlimactic conclusion on Feb. 18, when the patent infringement case of Jacobsen v. Katzer was settled out of court.

However, the case did include a landmark decision for open-source software when in 2008 a panel of judges for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that copyrights can be enforced under open-source licenses. It boiled down to the question of whether the author of software distributed under an open-source license (in this case, the Artistic License 1.0) was entitled to damages when a third party used said software in a commercial product without permission, attribution or compensation to the original author.

Under terms of the settlement, Matthew Katzer, the owner of a model train vendor called Kamind, must pay US$100,000 to Robert Jacobsen, a software developer and member of the Java Model Railroad Interface Project. Katzer must also refrain from any further legal action.

Andrew Updegrove, a partner at the Boston technology law firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP, as well as a legal counsel to the Linux Foundation, wrote in an e-mail to SD Times that the 2008 decision gives validity to open-source licenses and the developers who own the copyright to open code.

“The rulings in the case establish several important [Free and Open Source Software] license terms and remedies for the first time in the U.S.: the right to prevent a developer's copyright and authorship acknowledgements from being removed from their code, and the right to collect damages if the terms of a FOSS license are violated," said Updegrove. "Absent the ability to collect damages, as a practical matter there would be little to prevent commercial software vendors from incorporating FOSS software into their proprietary products in violation of FOSS license terms.

“These important rulings will stand as precedents in the federal courts in question, and as influential guidance to other courts throughout the country. Until now, these legal issues had never been tested in a U.S. court.”

Related Search Term(s): open source

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