Corporate counsel often hire external technology lawyers to review, draft, or negotiate technology contracts such as software licensing agreements because of their ability to identify software licensing issues, resolve complex licensing models, and compare the subject deal to the many other unique technology contract structures to solve problems, according to a blog post by Kirkpatrick Law.

There are a few technology contract types that should signal a need for a technology attorney to review, so the article lists some software examples to narrow the focus, but these could be true for other technology types.

The article covers one-sided enterprise agreements, the short and simple agreement, and the standard agreement.

Read the article.

A federal court has set the precedent that licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) can be treated like legal contracts, and developers can legitimately sue when those contracts are breached, reports Keith Collins for the digital news outlet Quartz.

The GNU GPL requires that anyone using GPL-licensed software to produce some other software, must provide the resulting software as open-sourced with the same license if it’s released to the public. Or the second developer could pay a licensing fee to the original developer.

South Korean developer Hancom Office incorporated an open-source PDF interpreter called Ghostscript into its word-processing software, but it declined to open-source its software or to pay Ghostware’s developer.

Read the article.

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One of the most critical and important contracts a startup can focus on, and do correctly, is to properly license IP from a university so that it can be commercialized going forward, according to a video prepared by Peter Buckland of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP.

He explains that a common question he hears from entrepreneurs is about how to work with technology that they created at their universities, going forward in a commercial endeavor.

“In most cases, anyone that is in anyway being paid by a university to do research, the university owns that research and for many of the universities we work with in this area, whether it’s Stanford or Cal or others, they’re all pretty in tune with their mandate, which is to commercialize that technology,” he says in the video. And the best way to do that, he adds, is to partner with the people who created that technology.

Watch the video.