Intellectual property rights and ownership

Posted by mike - November 20th, 2008

  • Hi, My question regards intellectual property rights and ownership. I am developing a technology for creating and indexing documents and knowledge materials. Ultimately, the outcome of this will be an XML type mark-up language that will be used for adding meta-data to textual documents. I am intending to release that technology as an open source but I still want my name to be related to it, no matter who uses it or where it has been implemented. I would like to make sure that there would not be someone else who would claim that they have invented it. There are a lot of open source technologies and solutions that are being developed by communities but most of the time there are certain people or organisations that stand behind the initial idea or creation. Could you please tell me what are the ways to achieve this? Thank you for your consideration. Regards Ivan


  • Hello, Ivan. I understand (and applaud) your desire to publish your code in open source. Certainly traditional intellectual property right protection through trademark and are available. There are a number of licensing options, too. Please clarify your comments in your third paragraph. For example, are you seeking to protect your code through your own exclusive efforts, or are you seeking the involvement of some community of others to assist you? Thanks, weisstho-ga


  • Hi weisstho, Thanks you for your response. I am definitely looking at involving an open community in my project. Let me tell you what it is about: I am developing the specifications of a mark-up language. I want to release the first version and open it to the public so that anyone can contribute in further development. I do not mind this language to be used by anyone and in any types of software products. However I really want my name to be always associated with this mark-up language as the initial creator. For example the HTML language is not owned by anyone (or at least it looks like that) but any book that covers the Internet history mentions one and the same name as the initial creator of the HTML. Also anyone can create commercial web pages with HTML. I am not saying that my mark-up language will become so popular; this is just a comparison. Thank you Ivan


  • Hi Ivan! There's more than one way to ensure that your name is associated with a project: 1. Use an approach like Linus Torvalds and mix your own name into the project name (e.g. Linux, or like ReiserFS creator Hans Reiser) 2. Choose an appropriate virulent licensing scheme. A list of licenses that would accomplish what you want can be found at The OSI Open Source Initiative's site ( http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.php ). The most prominent of the licenses there is the GPL (GNU General Public License) - I have used this license and similar ones in projects of my own and they are usually pretty well fitted to insure that your notices stay in the files. My only warning about the licenses listed there is that they partly inhibit the usability of your project in commercial products. The MPL (Mozilla Public License) is also a license worth looking at if you want to hard-wire your name into the license itself (search for the term netscape in the license. You might also need a special license for your normative documents (best published with them) or at least list a notice with them. You can find a good example at W3C's Intellectual Property FAQ ( http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/IPR-FAQ-20000620.html ). Make sure to have a close look at one of the normative specification documents of the W3C, too. An example would be The Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 Specification ( http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/ ). Take a close look at the notice. I think that is something you could work with, too. 3. Provide online documentation for your project. Documentation is - in my experience - something people are very happy to have but very lazy do create. As long as your documentation is useful for the project it will be linked to whenever the project is talked about... which will also help you with search engines like google. This way people who start inquiring about a project that is based on your work will first be exposed to your documentation and will associate your name with the project, probably long before they actually get to do real work in this field. I also recommend to actively supply links to your project documents to search engines and to add meta-information (like author info). 4. Provide a central place for project development. If you manage to lure developers to your project development site, you'll have direct contact with them and also a lot of influence on future developments and the creation of a core distribution. At the very least you will be one of the administrators listed. A good place to start would be opening a project at a site like Sourceforge ( www.sourceforge.net ). This would also give you the benefits of being able to use central source repository systems like CVS. 5. Post release notes to appropriate newsgroups (I won't suggest a group here, as that is largely dependant on your idea of a target audience) and supply links to software collection sites like Freshmeat ( http://freshmeat.net/add-project/ ). This will also act as documentation later as to who a project originated with. I hope this helps. In general I can assure you that Open Source people are all aware of the work that other people put into creating something new and appreciate the effort for the community. In my personal experience Open Source people give credit where credit is due, so I don't think you'll have to worry about being forgotten. BTW: Your assumption that HTML is not owned by anybody is wrong as you can read in the latest (and last) normative specification for HTML4.0 ( Section)( http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-html40-19980424/about.html#h-1.4 ). In most countries works by an author are automatically ed to him (also it helps to add an appropriate notice). More information on this can be found for example at Dictionary.com ( http://www.dictionary.com/search?q= ).


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