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<H2>Week 8 - March 9/11 <BR> Guest Lecture </H2>
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<H2>Software Copyright, Software Patents, and Free Software</H2>
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<A HREF="http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/review95/node8.html#SECTION00260000000000000000">
Robert Dewar</A>, Professor of Computer Science, NYU
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The issue of intellectual property rights in general, and in particular
for software, has become of increasing concern in the electronic age.
In this talk we will review how copyright and patents work in the USA,
and how our system is very different from that of most other countries.
We will look at some of the proposals that are being made for changing
the current laws, and see how both current and proposed rules would
affect the ability to produce free software using various models. We
will also discuss the philsophy of the GNU General Public License, and
see how this affects the Ada world in particular (Ada is a programming
language that is in use in military systems).
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Dr. Robert Dewar is a Professor of Computer Science at New York
University, and is past chair of the department there, and past
Associate Director of the Courant Institute. He is also President and
CEO of Ada Core Technologies, and has worked in the Ada field for nearly
twenty years. He directed the GNAT project at NYU, and continues to be
very much involved in the continued development of the GNAT technology
at ACT. Given that ACT is a company that depends entirely on the
philosophy of Free Software and the GPL, he spends a lot of time
investigating and explaining the associated IPR issues!
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<H3>Browse</H3>
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<LI><A HREF="http://www.cpsr.org/" target="_top">CPSR: Computer
Professionals for
Social Responsibility</A> http://www.cpsr.org/
<LI>
<A HREF="http://www.geom.umn.edu/events/courses/1996/cmwh/Copyright/vpublic.html"
target="_top">Notes on Copyright and Related Issues</A>
http://www.geom.umn.edu/events/courses/1996/cmwh/Copyright/vpublic.html
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<H3>Assignment</H3>
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Take notes during the lecture for topics and themes. Do some
online research on issues of intellectual property rights and GNU. Use
the search engines on the web. Report to the impacts list on your
findings, including your sources (where did you find things?). Include:
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<LI>a definition and description of "intellectual property rights"
<LI>a definition and description of GNU
<LI>one url that relates to a topic presented in the lecture
<LI>a summary of what you found
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I will put all the urls you find into the browse section for this
week.
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<B>Due date</B>: Monday, March 23.
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<LI>Assignment from Week 3 is due Wednesday March 11. <BR>This is the
10 day observation report on a newsgroup or discussion list.
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<A HREF="http://lrw.net/impacts" target="_top">Top Page</A>
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