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Hi I am not a legal beaver, and I am aware that what happens in the US does not really effect us much. However I have included in full Bobs letter on the subject. (I never realised it got as far as the BBC News). All the best Peter L-J Bob reports... I am very, very happy to report that the final papers have been signed, and the dispute with Matt Katzer about JMRI software and patents, copyrights, domain names, etc, is now over. I haven't written much about this on JMRIusers before (*1, *2) because I wanted the list to concentrate on software and trains, rather than on disputes. I think now is a good time to make one last post, hoping to draw a line under things so that all involved can get back to model railroading. For those who haven't been following it, there's a summary (*3) and complete history (*4) available on the web. You can see the complete "docket", the record of legal documents filed (*5). There's also a very interesting, though somewhat long, list of articles published about the case (*6), which gives you an impression of how much attention this generated outside model railroading. For those of you not familiar with all this, back in 2004 Matt Katzer started a series of inappropriate and illegal actions against JMRI. It became a long list of things, culminating in his lawyer trying to get me fired from my day job. This ended up in Federal Court, where it went back and forth for almost four years. Along the way, we forced Matt to destroy two of his ill-gotten patents, made some important legal precedents for other free and open-source projects (*7 *8), and got our decoderpro.com and jmri.org domain names back. This required a _huge_ legal effort, involving extensive formal legal work, coordination with other parts of the larger free and open source community, and the work of a large number of volunteers. Victoria K Hall orchestrated all of this, wrote legal brief after legal brief, and deserves a large amount of credit for keeping Katzer at bay for long enough for the legal system to understand the issues, thereby finally defeating him. That defeat become inevitable with the Court's "Summary Judgement" ruling of last December, which ruled that Katzer had illegally taken JMRI decoder definitions, had illegally removed author names and copyright notices from them, and had illegally cyber- squatted on our decoderpro.com name. It also found that Katzer's counter-suit for $6M (not a typo) against me was an inequitable "litigation tactic", and dismissed it. More information on that is available at (9). The next step was to be a trial in June to determine whether Katzer did these things deliberately. We were very likely to win that, but nothing in the legal system is ever certain. It was going to be expensive, and take a lot of time and effort from people who were voluntarily helping. If something went wrong, appeals would take longer, and involve even more work and expense. It wasn't clear that I could ask the work of them in good conscience, and it wasn't clear that I would be able to afford the costs which had to be paid up front. Court reporters, transcripts, brief printing, etc, are extremely expensive. I didn't want Katzer to know it for strategic reasons, but I'd already had to take out two mortgages to pay costs. Since he was threatening my livelihood, I really didn't have a lot of choice whether to do that or not, but I wasn't sure whether I could successfully go back to the bank again. It was time to think about settling the case, because in addition to lowering risk and effort, this could actually do something that a trial could not: It could prevent Matt from trying to assert his patents against anybody else. Due to some prior legal maneuvering, Matt had gotten his patent actions removed from the Court case, though at the cost of the destruction of two of his patents. His patent misuse was not covered in the summary judgement ruling. It wouldn't be included at trial. To address those patents, we'd have to appeal that ruling, win the appeal, and then go back and go through the whole process again. On the other hand, we might be able to reach a settlement agreement that covered patents, and also applied that coverage to everybody, not just me. That was an important goal to reach. It took time and a lot of work, but in the end we were able to accomplish this. Again, a huge amount of credit goes to Victoria Hall and her colleague David McGowan for making this happen. You can read the entire settlement agreement here (10), along with some longer commentary on the details, but basically Matt has said that he "releases" all JMRI users and developers of liability for anything that might have happened in the past, or will happen for the next 18 months. In addition, he's also said in Court that there are no features of JMRI that infringe his patents, including the ones that started all this back in 2004; any future dispute will start with him having admitted that fact. It's certainly true the 18 months from now is not forever. It's my hope that Matt is serious when he says that he wants to get back to model railroading and software writing, rather than being involved in legal actions. I think that would be great, because everybody gains when people write better software for model railroading. I hope he's able to get back to running a business that makes his customers happy. But, if something like this dispute ever comes up again, we have established a very strong record of law and facts with which to defend it. Even better, the settlement agreement includes a "loser pays" term for any future disputes. Matt has been paying his lawyers, and he's had to pay $100k toward our costs (which, like the punch line of a bad joke, _almost_ covers my costs; I'll still be $21K in the hole after he pays off in 18 months). The hope is that "loser pays" and the high cost he's paid now will weigh heavily in his decision should he ever consider attacking again in the future. All in all, this is a good outcome, and it wouldn't have been possible without the work of a lot of talented, generous and determined people. I owe all of you a lot. Thank you. And with that, I'm going to pack three filing cabinets of papers into boxes, stick them in the attic just in case, put this all behind me, and go back to writing code. There's this bug that I've been looking forward to working on... Bob 1) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jmriusers/message/20372 2) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jmriusers/message/17824 3) http://jmri.org/k/summary.shtml 4) http://jmri.org/k/History.shtml 5) http://jmri.org/k/docket/index.shtml 6) http://jmri.org/k/news.shtml 7) http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3775446/Bruce+Perens:+A+Big+Ch\ ange+for+Open+Source.htm 8) http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3866316/Bruce-Perens-Insid\ e-Open-Sources-Historic-Victory 9) http://jmri.org/k/Recent.shtml#2009-12-10 10) http://jmri.org/k/Recent.shtml#2010-02-17 -- Bob Jacobsen jacobsen@xxxxxxxxxxxx +1-510-486-7355 fax +1-510-643-8497 AIM, Skype JacobsenRG -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html