Commons Law
Andrew Katz
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Andrew Katz is partner and head of the IT/IP team at Moorcrofts LLP, a boutique law firm based in the Thames Valley providing corporate and commercial advice to knowledge-based industries. Andrew qualified as a barrister and requalified (and now practises) as a solicitor. He financed his way through bar school by jobbing as a (fairly incompetent) programmer (in turbo pascal). He now specialises in free and open source software law and has written and lectured widely. He is a founder editor of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, a fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe and advises businesses and communities on free and open source licensing and strategy worldwide. He is slightly obsessive about live music. These are his opinions, and not those of his firm.
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Back from the USA
Published 09:31, 21 March 11
It's been a busy couple of weeks. I've just come back from the US East Coast to catch up with open source related goings-on in Boston and New York.
Boston (Wednesday) kicked off with a cup of tea with Kat McCabe from Optaros. I've worked with Optaros in the past and it was good to catch up with her: she's an alumna of Black Duck, she also knew well two of the people - Andrew Sinclair (Canonical) and Karen Copenhaver (Choate Hall) I was due to meet later in the day.
Next meeting: Esteban Rockett from Motorola on a conference call to talk about the SPDX project. SPDX is a fascinating way of adding virtual bar codes to source code, in order to assist in provenance tracking and licence compliance.
Later that day: an-in person Project Harmony meeting, at which we got into some fairly esoteric legal arguments about the different jurisdictions' approach to copyright law, and whether it's possible for a present assignment of future copyright can only take place on creation of the work in question, or whether it can also take place on the carrying out of a subsequent act (such as making a submission to a project).
It was great finally to meet Mark Radcliffe from DLA Piper, who is currently lead draftsman on Harmony. Amanda Brock from Canonical arranged a meeting at the fittingly named Legal Seafoods.
On Thursday, after a meeting with a publisher to discuss an up-coming free and open source law book, I took the train from Boston to New York, through very pretty New England towns and villages.
Friday, I spent much of the day with Bill Patry, something of a hero of mine, of which more later. Bill is senior copyright counsel at Google, and a wonderful guy. Google has recently purchased the whole of the building in the Meatpacking District in which it used to occupy just a couple of floors. It is, apparently, the largest single investment in Google's history, and since it occupies the second-biggest single parcel of land in Manhattan, the scale of the place is breathtaking.
The stories are true: it has a barn-like playroom containing pool tables, table tennis tables, massage chairs and video games. It has a Lego room. People travel from one end of the building to the other by scooter, obtained from and parked at handy scooter-stations.
The cafeteria really does contain some of the finest food known to humanity. And the atmosphere is friendly, collegiate and pretty compelling.
It was a very worthwhile trip, whether to cement relationships originally developed by email, twitter, or conference call, or to make new connections.
Connections really require a mix of the real and the virtual.
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