In a crucial win for the free software movement, a federal appeals court has ruled that even software developers who give away the programming code for their works can sue for copyright infringement if someone misappropriates that material.
The decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington helps clarify a murky area of the law concerning how much control programmers can exert over their intellectual property once it has been released for free into the so-called “open source” software community.
People are free to use that material in their own products, but they must credit the original authors of the programming code and release their modifications into the wild as well, a cycle that’s critical for free software to continue improving.
Because the code was given away for free, thorny questions emerge when a violation has been discovered and someone is found to have shoved the code into their own for-profit products without giving anything back, in the form of attribution and disclosure of the alterations they made.
In the latest case, involving a computer application that model-train enthusiasts use to program the chips that control their trains, the US District Court in San Francisco ruled that the plaintiff could sue for breach of contract but not copyright infringement.
Robert Jacobsen, who manages an open-source software group that created an application he says was infringed, sought an injunction against KAM Industries, which makes a rival product. The lower court denied the motion. The appeals court vacated that ruling on Wednesday and returned the case to the district court.
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