cyber/telecom/admin law, teaches at the school of law

various topics, including:

• licensing

• licenses

• discussion of LB67, almost certainly faild Right To Repair law

• DMCA and exemption process

• cryptocurrency issues

Will talk about as follows

• Crypto currency

• OSS licences

• LB67

• Evil MicroSucks

government perspective

• property, not money

must be taxed like property, and taxed like such

has many, many edge cases which are not, and can not easily be covered by the law

could theoretically be subject to use taxes

• these are extremely hard to enforce

the issue of use taxes is a good reason to use cryptocurrency, as it's anonymous, and therefore hard to trace

difference between licenses and contracts

• original work of authorship, fixed in a tangible media of expression is copyright

  • any time something is written down, copyright is created

  • many distinct rights

  • independent creation is a valid defense

  • facts, functional data are not copyrightable

  • copyright is enforcable, and can generate statutory damages, 750-100K simply by making an unauthorized copy

  • is fixed term

• contracts – governs usage

• license – requires assignment of copyright, get statutory damages

three licenses

• mit

  • simplest, easiest to understand

  • don't sue me, give me credit

  • not gauranty of suitability for any particular use

• gpl

  • copyleft, expressly opposed to copyright, viral

  • 2 versus 3, 3 deals more with linking, particularly how that must be handled, 3 is more strict

• apache

  • like MIT, but has twists

  • longer and more detailed

  • very lawyered up

  • for any patent that exists, if the software implements it, the patent holder licenses it to the author, if the patent holder is involved

is GPL enforcable?

• very important that this is a license, for enforcement

• linksys case, gpl is therefore enforceable and considered a license

public domain

• write source, release, no license, no protections

• public domain is based on the fixed terms, thus anything that has fallen out of copyright, or is placed in the public domain

• however, placing in such is very fuzzy and unclear

• use MIT license instead of placing in the public domain

a requirement for varying companies to make repair avialable without official authorizations

Nebraska went fast and died hard because of requirements for things outside of just john deere and the like, iphones particularly

requires companies to release repair information, specifications and tool plans

prevents lock-in and monopolies

drm and lock-in can prevent innovation and can insure cash-flow, however, can also encourage innovation and is used for retail price maintenance

requires sale of products that do not require circumvention to repair