The 6 bases for lawful processing of personal data

One of the key tenets in European data privacy law is the general principle of fair and lawful processing. The principle was initially established in Article 6 a) of the Data Protection Directive of 1995 – “Member States shall provide that personal data must be processed fairly and lawfully”. It was retained and further expanded…Continue reading

The rise of NFTs and their interplay with copyright

The rise of NFTs The rise of NFTs and their recent incursion into mainstream territory reveals just one of the many layers of disruptive potential brought by blockchain technology and smart contracts. In a similar way as “blockchain” and “crypto”, “NFT” is now officially a buzzword with all the implications that this brings in terms…Continue reading

The MIT license and the BSD family of licenses

The MIT license is a permissive open source license that originated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1980s. Currently, MIT is the second most popular among all OSS licenses, lagging behind Apache 2.0 with a narrow margin (30% usage for Apache 2.0 vs 26% usage for MIT based on data from WhiteSource).…Continue reading

The Apache License 2.0

The Apache license 2.0 is one of the most popular permissive OSS licenses. There are many examples of prominent software products and successful projects licensed under Apache 2.0. The list includes Kubernetes (the famous open source system for deployment and management of containerized apps), the majority of the Android mobile platform and its documentation, Apache…Continue reading

Open Source Software – The Challenges

After analyzing the numerous benefits offered by open source technology in our previous article, we will now focus our attention on the potential drawbacks that you should be aware of when OSS is used in a business setting. Being fully cognizant of those is crucial when you have to provide legal advice to key stakeholders.…Continue reading

Open Source Software – The Advantages

When formulating and communicating legal advice to business stakeholders in a technological setting it is very important to be fully aware of the advantages and disadvantages presented by the use of open source software (OSS) products. OSS solutions can be highly beneficial for both internal use within an organization as well as integration or linking…Continue reading

Source Code as a concept

There are two technical terms that you will often encounter when going through the pages of a software licensing agreement or a software development agreement. These are source code and object code. Nevertheless, before elucidating those concepts of source code and object code, it would make sense to first clarify what software is. Like many…Continue reading

Main types of IT agreements

In this first installment of Tips on Tech Contracts we will focus our attention on some of the most common types of information technology agreements – software licenses and IPR assignments, cloud agreements, professional services and managed services agreements and hardware agreements.   Software licensing agreements and IPR assignments At the core of each software…Continue reading

Google v Oracle and the copyrightability of APIs

On 5th of April 2021 the US Supreme Court handed down its decision on the decade long legal battle between Oracle and Google regarding the copying of code from the Java API. This article will present a summary of the case as well as an analysis of its outcome and some additional thoughts on the copyrightability…Continue reading