Jason Schultz

Jason Schultz is a Staff Attorney specializing in intellectual property and reverse engineering. Prior to joining EFF, Schultz worked at the law firm of Fish & Richardson P.C., where he spent most of his time invalidating software patents and defending open source developers in law suits. While at F&R, he co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of the Internet Archive, Prelinger Archives, and Project Gutenberg in support of Eric Eldred's challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Prior to F&R, Schultz served as a law clerk to the Honorable D. Lowell Jensen and as a legal intern to the Honorable Ronald M. Whyte, both in the Northern District of California federal court system. During law school, Schultz served as Managing Editor of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and helped found the Samuelson Clinic, the first legal clinic in the country to focus on high tech policy issues and the public interest. Schultz also has undergraduate degrees in Public Policy and Women's Studies from Duke University. Jason maintains a personal blog at lawgeek.net.

Current legal threats and potential patent threats to Linux

For years now we've been worried about patent and copyright attacks against open source projects. Now they are here. With Open Source Software reaching the commercial mainstream, SCO is just the tip of the iceberg. Patent, DMCA, and other copyright attacks are on the horizon. This talk will walk through the current threats to open source projects, including SCO v. Linux, Acacia's patent threats over streaming media and Wifi, as well as Blizzard's DMCA case against the BNETD Project. The session will also discuss what the defendants in these suits might have done to minimize or extinguish their risk of being sued, if anything. Finally, we'll talk about what we can all do to make OSS projects less vulnerable in the future, including changes to the law as well as building community defense resources.