InfoWorld has an article on lurking legal gotchas (and how to avoid them) for IT pros. Its list includes:

• Confidentiality and privacy violations
• Pornography use
• Copyright and source code violations
• “Financial shenanigans” – essentially fraud or other criminal activity.

The article is based on US law, but the above list is applicable in New Zealand. However an important distinction not made entirely clear is that between intentional (i.e. malicious) activity and accidental contravention. Also, in most cases employees who are honestly carrying out their job are entitled to be indemnified by their employer for any liability arising against them personally (subject to employment contracts and other factors). Independent contractors are generally liable for their own actions, however, and insurance is an important risk management practice for contractors.

Open source wrangling

Computerworld reports on a controversy over whether a US company has breached the GPL terms of the R statistical software (developed out of Auckland University and the original version of which I used in stage-1 stats). The company, Revolution Analytics, denies breaching the GPL. It uses the increasingly popular (but sometimes controversial) “open core” model where (for example) the core program remains licensed on open terms, but other components and add-ons are under proprietary licenses. The situation highlights the sometimes murky issue of copyright ownership, assignment and licensing in large open source projects. Another example, involving OpenOffice, is reported here.

Copyright vs Contract law

A UK government advisory board, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, has completed a lengthy report (182 pages, 6MB pdf) on “the relationship between copyright and contract law”. The highly academic report appears to be a last hurrah for the quango, which is to be axed. The report is based on extensive research into “creator contracts” – i.e. supply side contracts such as those entered into by authors, musicians, artists, etc – and “user contracts” – i.e. demand side contract typically involving licensing of IP to end users. A summary of the fairly impenetrable report is here.