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Closed, Proprietary, Felonious: The Toxic Rainbow of Locked Technology When is software free? Is it enough that the software be licensed under a free or open license? What about patents? Software as a service? Trade secrets? What about DRM? Is software ever free? There’s a saying in the software freedom movement: “if you can’t open it, it’s not yours.” That is, if you can’t run it, study it, improve it, and distribute it , then your technology isn’t free. It’s closed, proprietary, un-free. When software was first invented, it wasn’t considered to be a copyrightable work; it was something more like math, a collection of utilitarian facts. A series of acts of Congress and court decisions in the 1970s and 1980s gradually and firmly moved software into the realm of copyrightable “literary works” and in reaction, Richard Stallman started the Free Software movement, with the goal of halting and reversing the encroachment of un-freedom on software. The early free software licenses fo...

Appeals Court Tells Georgia: State Code Can’t be Copyrighted In a democracy, people should have the right to read, and publish, the law. In theory, that should be easier than ever today. The Internet has vastly improved public access to the “operating system” of our government—the local, state, and federal statutes and regulations we are expected to abide by. Unfortunately, some states have actually fought against easy access to the law. In Georgia, state officials have used copyright to extract fees and reward companies with state contracts. On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11 th Circuit handed down a powerful opinion that struck down the state of Georgia’s attempt to use copyright to suppress publication of its own laws. The ruling, which gives Georgians the right to read and publish the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, or OCGA, may also improve public access to legislative documents in other states. It’s just in time for this year’s Open Access Week , a time t...