Intellectual Property

If you know me or have been reading my blog long enough, you know that I am a proponent of open source concepts.

I remember posting to the Texas A&M Mailing list back in 2007 because I was running into a glut of roadblocks related to Intellectual Property in various projects that I was dabbling with at the time.

"Leaders in the ham radio arena who are to busy beating their own chests touting things like they are the "national association for amateur radio."

These so called leaders need to suggest/ lay some general concepts to steer the hobby to the future.... focus on spreading the importance of the open source concepts in the ham radio arena"

In my last big project the 73 Magazine Index, I realized that its contents will become lost to posterity due to intellectual property issues. A dirty shame....

Interestingly enough, I have noticed that TAPR has grasped the open concept.

They came up with an Open Hardware License, and I just noticed that the DCC DVD I bought was licensed as a Creative Commons 3.0 Share-A-Like work.

Consider this:
TAPR's membership journal publication, the Packet Status Register (PSR) featuring both technical and non-technical articles is an authoritative source for up-to-date user and technical information on digital issues.

Explicit permission is granted to reproduce any materials appearing herein for non-commercial amateur publications provided credit is given to both the author and TAPR...

Yet I just noticed on the front page of the ARRL's site:

Copyright © 2010 American Radio Relay League. Reproduction of material from any ARRL Web page without written permission is strictly prohibited.

Also: http://www.arrl.org/copyright-faqs

I've also noticed that "ARES" is registered trademark of the ARRL and so forth.

I'm sorry if I have not properly denoted all these various trademarks. It's not intentional, it's just an encumberment that I don't have time to keep up with.

The reason I decided to blog about "Intellectual Property" is because my local ham club is in a potential law suit over IP use that could effectively flush this non-profit educational organization of all it's assets.

So I encourage you to think about all this, and how productive or non-productive intellectual property is to the hobby and the world.

Here are some of my favorites:

Revolution OS

The Code Linux

Pirates of Silicon Valley (you can't watch this online due to IP, but it's worth watching)

http://www.fsf.org/

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html