Many OSS developers currently hold onto a number of legal fictions about the way patents, copyrights, and trademarks operate. This talk attempts to dispel most of these legal fictions, in particular, covering the following:

• What is generally considered copyrightable, and how it is determined by courts.
• What is generally considered fair use in computer programming, and how it is determined by courts.
• What it actually means for a work to be in the public domain, and assigning rights.

Patents

• The current legal standards for patentability.
• The current legal standards for obviousness.
• The current legal standards for infringement
• Costs of obtaining patents and litigating them.

Trademarks

• Whether registration is necessary to have a trademark
• What trademarks actually protect