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List:       kde-freeqt
Subject:    Re: [freeqt] Harmony Revival - Norwegian Law
From:       Christian Schaller <frostking () linuxrising ! com>
Date:       1999-03-26 11:05:42
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When discussing the chance of a lawsuit I think it is important to remember that
Troll Tech is located in Norway, putting their products under the jurisdiction of
Norwegian copyright and patents laws.

Norwegian laws is in general I think more liberal, and doesn't allow for example
patents on algorithms ans such.

If there is a genuine interest in reviving the Harmony project I think we should
get a written legal opinion.
I have contacted Jon Bing, at the University at Oslo, considered Norways leading
expert in this field of law. I have asked him to send me a price offer on a
written legal opinion and I will mail the offer to this list when I get it.
I suggest that we create a fund to pay for it, and ask through an anouncement on
Slashdot and similar to send contributions. If we get more money than needed the
rest can be donated to SPI or simmilar.

Due to the amount of different source code licenses poping up every day I guess we
will see more issues like this in the future on many different projects. If we
would be able to get the law on our side in Scandinavia, we could probably use
that as a way to get general European law to see things our way, and in the last
intance North-American law. This means that this issue is important to not only
the Harmony project, but to all free software developers out there. And I think
Scandinavia would be a good place to start, due to the presumably liberal laws I
mentioned earlier.

A written legal opinion is of course not worth anywhere near a court decision, but
if comming from such a person as Jon Bing, it would probably be enough to win a
norwegian law case.(If he agrees with us :-)

Any thoughts?

Sincerely,
Christian Schaller

-------------------------------------------------------------
# Christian Schaller aka frostking
# frostking@linuxrising.com
# AIM : ArticRuler
# homepage: http://www.linuxrising.com (or .org)
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