“The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online…In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licences set conditions on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer.”[--More from BBCNews]
In this specific case, a corporate entity used open source code without attributing the author or highlighting the modifications made to the code, violating the conditions of the open source licensing agreement. This ruling does have an impact on Creative Commons licensing, which is used by many academic institutions to assist authors in retaining their copyrights while publicly sharing their scholarly work – even if money does not exchange hands with the terms of the license, the conditions of use (i.e. attribution) still need to be met.
[Thanks Wendi!]
