""By opening the door to the increased likelihood of monetary
recovery, it changes the dynamic," says Jonathan Moskin, an
intellectual property specialist with the New York law firm of
White & Case. "And lawyers being lawyers, I'd expect to see
more litigation,"
"The litigation train
"The story begins in 2006, when Robert G. Jacobsen, a physics
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was
running the Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) project, filed
suit against Matthew A. Katzer, a Portland, Ore., businessman who
owns Kam Industries. Jacobsen claimed that Katzer had used a
portion of the JMRI in a commercial software program and was
redistributing the program without the credit required as part of
the artistic open source license it was distributed under.
"The case has bounced between federal District Court and the
Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), arguably the most
important court short of the U.S. Supreme Court for intellectual
property matters, says Lawrence Rosen, a Ukiah, Calif., attorney
who has done quite a bit of work in support of open source."
