Intellectual Property Talk at PyCon

[VanL]

I will be presenting a talk at PyCon, "The Absolute Minimum an Open
Source Developer Needs to Know About Intellectual Property." I want to
tailor this talk so that it is interesting to as many attendees as possible.

I am familiar with a lot of the internal divisions in the Free
Software/Open Source community. My intent is not to advocate for or
against any specific position, but rather to promote a common
understanding and address specific situations that developers may
encounter. In other words, a problem/solution approach, instead of an
argumentative approach.

With that in mind, I had in mind the following subjects:

- A brief primer on intellectual property (what are patents, trademarks,
copyrights, and trade secrets?)

- What to do when you have an idea you want to develop, but you are
working for somebody else

- What it means to incorporate GPL'd modules into your own code

- Ways to protect ideas that you have put into a proprietary software
product

- Ways to avoid, work around, or mitigate the effect of software patents

- Licensing, using, and distributing software (comparing and contrasting
the GPL, BSD, and Python licenses)

I am interested in hearing about 1) other topics of interest, and 2) the
relative level of interest in each topic. To keep within the time
limits for my talk, I intend to address the most popular topics in
roughly the order of their popularity.

Thanks,

Van Lindberg

[Robert Kern]

VanL wrote:
> - What it means to incorporate GPL'd modules into your own code

I don't have any suggestions for other material to cover, but I'd like to
express my interest in keeping this in your agenda. This is an issue that crops
up again and again with ill-informed opinions all around.

Of course, it would be nice if what you say agrees with my opinions on the
subject, but I'll let you slide if you at least say something sensible. ;-)

--
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco

[VanL]

Robert Kern wrote:

> I don't have any suggestions for other material to cover, but I'd like to
> express my interest in keeping this in your agenda. This is an issue that crops
> up again and again with ill-informed opinions all around.

Thanks for the feedback. +1 for discussing GPL incorporation.

> Of course, it would be nice if what you say agrees with my opinions on the
> subject, but I'll let you slide if you at least say something sensible. ;-)

I will try :)

Van