Free Software Licenses Finally Benefit from Protection

Yesterday marked a big step in copyright protection of open source licensed software, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that an open source software developer can claim copyright infringement, even if the work is released under a free software license.

The appellate court reversed a district court ruling that decided that copyright infringement claims did not apply in this case. Robert Jacobsen developed software for use with model trains, and released it under the Artistic License for anybody to download and use. He then pursued copyright infringement claims against a company that used part of his work, without even giving him credit, for the creation of a commercial software package.

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