It was an island of peace in the sea of IP litigation. While companies routinely battle infringement suits in other aspects of IP law, businesses rarely are sued for infringing open source software. This tranquility, however, may be coming to an end. In the past six months, four companies have been accused of infringing the copyrights in open source software.
Verizon Communications, Monsoon Multimedia, High-Gain Antennas and Xterasys Corp. all distributed products containing the open source BusyBox software, but these companies allegedly failed to make their products’ source codes freely available to users, as required by the open source license for BusyBox. By failing to comply with the license terms, the companies lost their right to use the BusyBox software. Thus their distributions of the software constituted copyright infringement, according to the complaints in these cases. And these suits are likely just the beginning.
