Interesting panel discussion.

#1 - Sleepycat CEO
#2 - Lisa ?; lawyer
#3 - Aaron Swartz
#4 - Larry Rosen

Open Source (free because it’s useful, strategic) vs. Free Software (everything should be free) vantage points.

Q. Creative commons vs. source license? Larry Rosen: Courts have confused the issue of software IP by applying both patents and copyright to it. [I’d wondered about this problem; software is kind of in the middle of both and neither is quite right.]

Q. W3C DTD & Schema copyrightable? W3C says yes. But would content using that schema be copyrighted by the W3C? Lisa: Functionality/methods can’t be covered by copyright. –maybe that applies to this case.

OpenOffice person in audience. Teddy Ruxpin case—successful contributory copyright lawsuit. Bootleg cassettes made Ruxpin tell different stories, make different movements.

Q on “Infected” code (could open source contain stealth IP)? Topical; SCO lawsuit.

Aggregation. Aaron: It’s obviously illegal to put scraped feed contents on your page without attribution, obviously legal to write a tool that scrapes to generate feeds. Dave Winer: case of someone who didn’t know RSS was generated auto by Radio. Got mad when it appeared on someone else’s site. After that was explained, problem kind of disappeared.

The RSS topic was starting to get too long and the moderator wanted to switch subjects, before I could get my question in, which was exactly along those lines. He said to defer those questions to Dave Winer’s keynote tomorrow.