| Today, the information industry has become the basic industry, pillar industryand the leading industry of the national economy. Informatization construction of thecountry will directly affect the national economic development and the improvementof people’s living standards. It’s no doubt that software has strategic position as thecore and soul of the information industry.In recent years, open source software becomes the mainstream in certain areas ofthe global IT industry gradually, Google R&D the most popular Android phone,whose package based on Linux system, for example. Open source software isbecoming an important opportunity for the development of Chinese software, either.Along with the advancement of history, copyright has become the core of the legalsystem of software regulation. As one kind of software, open source software is alsosubject to the regulation of copyright law. A problem we must face is that to studyopen source software copyright protection system, with which will speed up thedevelopment process of China’s information industry.The text of this paper is divided into four parts:Part I: The outline of open source software and its copyright protection system.Introduce the classification of software. From the perspective of copyright protection,software can be divided into the public domain software, commercial software, freesoftware and open source software. Describes the origin of the open source software.The open source movement originated in the free software movement, which wasadvocated by the father of free software, Richard Matthew Stallman. In a sense, opensource movement originated in the Hacker culture. Business model exploration hasbeen perfecting of the open source software after30years of development. Thisarticle quote the definition from OSIA to introduce10criteria of the open sourcesoftware, Introduce the development status of software copyright protection at homeand abroad. Lists current files of software copyright protection.Part II: Unscramble open source software copyright protected form. Introducethe concept of open source software licenses, it’s a agreement between the open source software publisher and open source software users. From one level it is acontract that reflects the most basic legal characteristics of open source software.Analyze and compare several common open-source software licenses, GPL license,LGPL license, MPL license, BSD license, Apache license. This section also contrastdifferent open source software licenses, discusses the personal rights and propertyrights of open source software. In short, distinguished from copyright of thetraditional civil law, personal rights may be waived; Open source software advocatethe transfer of property rights, and not opposed to commercial operation.Part III: Risk analysis of open source software copyright protection.Open sourcesoftware copyright protection system and its problems. Although open sourcesoftware has many advantages, the risk can not be ignored. First, there’s a problemwith open source software copyright protection that who has the ownership of rights?The openness determines the complexity and dispersibility of open source softwarecode. A large open source project, its code from different authors, or even no contactbetween the authors. Open source software development process is likely to becompleted by the authors spontaneously, rather than to be organized as commercialsoftware or to be promoted according to plan. Dispersed sources combine with thediversity of open source software licenses result in ownership risk. Second, thethird-party codes lead to the risk of open source software copyright infringement.There’s a huge number of open source software authors, development of Internettechnology makes open source community spread codes simple. A high degree offreedom makes open source software face a huge risk of infringement. Once part of alarge open source software code mixed infringing code, it may trigger a series ofinfringement cases. Not only the original software but also derivative works may faceinfringement litigation. Even open source software customers may be involved incopyright infringement. The analysis shows that the difference between open sourcesoftware and traditional software is the reason for dilemma of copyright protectionsystem.Part IV: Give some suggestions to improve open source software copyrightprotection system. According to the preceding analysis, the study will givesuggestions both on technical level and legislation level. From an industry point of view, a variety of methods can be used, enhance open source community managementcapabilities, establish improved open source code Specification, maintain theindependence of the open source software, save customer list, contract risk terms,pre-preserving evidence. From a legislative point of view, the open source softwarelicenses contractual relationship should be clearly protected by law; restrict originallicense revocation rights; adopt judicial interpretation to define derivative works ofthe open source software; clear application of the law infringement dispute of opensource software copyright; resolve open source software license conflicts bylegislation; balance reasonable use and infringement boundaries of open sourcesoftware by legislation.Currently, research of open source software copyright protection in our countryis not comprehensive enough, need to further deepen and combing. There are a lot ofdefects in this article, the only hope is play role of the initiate. Through research onthe topic, from the industry point of view, the legislative point of view, provide usefulideas and methods for the improvement of open source software copyrightprotection. Hope that open source software may enter into the normal track ofdevelopment as commercial software, create an opportunity that China developsoftware industry, access to software core technology, break Western developedcountries software industry monopoly, Contribute to the economic and social. |
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