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Wednesday October 18, 2006

IANAL and That's OK!

One of the neat people that I met last week at ApacheCon was Cliff Schmidt, Vice President of Legal Affairs for the Apache Software Foundation.

I only got to attend one of Cliff's talks last week, but it was a lot of fun. The session was very interactive and he only got to cover a sampling of interesting issues surrounding Copyright and Patent law -- we didn't get to Trademarks and trade secrets. And I missed the open source "license junkie" talks

Cliff and I had a chance to catch up at the airport before leaving the conference. I was fascinated to learn that Cliff is not a lawyer and yet he is having loads of fun and cannot hardly keep up with the demand for his own consulting business (Symbioss Strategy [Cliff do you have a website?]). He confirmed what I've suspected for a long time: there is value in crossing the beams between law and technology. This makes sense. Most all creative work is becoming knowledge work. And as technology has a huge impact on society it follows that understanding how to apply and leverage Intellectual Property law to empower creative work is and will be in great demand.

And it doesn't necessarily require being a lawyer. Cliff (nor I) would ever purport to giving legal advice. However it is becoming apparent that there are no "boilerplate" answers for tough questions of how to handle IP issues in technology. This isn't to say that productivity gains are impossible. In fact one of the most influential voices in this area is Lawrence Lessig of the Creative Commons project. Lessig has done the world an enormous service in conveying difficult legal and technical issues in his book Free Culture. And Creative Commons has pioneered a novel approach to combining a human readable deed to accompany legalese in designing the set of "Some Rights Reserved" Creative Commons Licenses.

One of my co-workers and mentors is Carla Schroer. Carla has been very influential in her role in legal affairs for Java since the Java™ platform was created. I have really enjoyed learning from Carla about how Sun has handled IP issues in technology -- and specifically Java -- through our work on the DLJ and also our work to open source Java. Carla is not a lawyer, and you may not have heard about her, but I cannot imagine how the Java Software organization could possibly address the complex issues around compatibility, licensing and branding without her guidance.

Another one of my co-workers, Simon Phipps, you probably already know. But did you know that while Simon is not a lawyer he is a confirmed legal geek and license junkie? For sampling of his writings please check out The Zen of Free, Free and Open Source Licensing, and The Jurisdiction Paradox.

Of course I couldn't talk about my favorite examples of IANAL without mentioning Pamela Jones. I have never met PJ, but her top ranked legal blog provides a continuous flow of education on technology and IP issues.

Some of my friends have suggested that I go to law school. But, as my Java Marketing colleague Rich Sands mentioned, "Tom, you just have too much fun with technology to give it up!". Rich is right. And I've had the opportunity to meet some very tech savvy lawyers who "get it"... Therefore I shall continue to focus on technology while keeping on eye on the right to be creative.

Posted by tmarble ( Oct 18 2006, 03:03:13 PM CDT ) Permalink