Commercial Law Commons^™

Jacobsen Revisited: Conditions, Covenants And The Future Of Open-Source Software Licenses, Yamini Menon

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Open-source software licensing has become mainstream in the field of software development. Nowhere is this more evident than in the 2008 Federal Circuit decision Jacobsen v. Katzer, where the court first interpreted the terms of an open-source software license. The Jacobsen decision offers an important first step in how to interpret the terms of an open-source license, though it does not address how to interpret licenses other than the Artistic License. This Article explores how Jacobsen’s reasoning can be used to interpret the terms of other open-source licenses, particularly the GPL v.2, GPL v.3, Apache License v.2, BSD …

Electronic Chattel Paper: Invitation Accepted, Jane K. Winn

Articles

In 1999, Revised U.C.C. Article 9 governing secured lending was updated to permit the creation of "electronic chattel paper" ("ECP"). Traditional chattel paper is used widely in some sectors of the US economy to finance equipment purchases in part because a chattel paper financers who perfects by taking possession can achieve priority over a pre-existing secured lender who perfected by filing. Revised U.C.C. § 9-105 defined a new form of "control" over ECP that would be treated as equivalent to possession of traditional chattel paper, permitting chattel paper financers to retain their superpriority status with electronic documents.

Because chattel paper …