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Cndnsd Vrsn: 4:00pm Thursday May 7 ACS Rm 123 - Legal Issues
Our May meeting will feature a session on legal issues that are near and
dear to FRUUG members. Carl Oppedahl, of the Frisco Colorado firm Oppedahl &
Larson, will address many of the issues that have been brought up by FRUUG
members over the last few months. Carl will talk about intellectual property
issues--namely what you give away when you go to work for someone, and what
are the issues around software licensing and prohibitions on disassembly and
reverse engineering. Carl will talk about the current state of Network
Solutions, Inc.'s domain dispute policy, and whether it's still important to
obtain a registered trademark on an Internet domain name to keep it safe
from others who might like to take it away. Finally, Carl will discuss
independent contractor issues, namely what liabilities contractors need to be
concerned about, employee vs. independent contractor status, and what to do
to enforce the contracts that you sign. The meeting will end with what is
sure to be an interesting question-and-answer session.
Mr. Oppedahl is a programmer himself, and has been technically trained in
physics, electrical engineering, mathematics, and software engineering.
This, plus his law degree from Harvard Law School, has helped to put him at
the forefront of computer software and Internet litigation. Carl represented
Road Runner Computer Systems in a dispute in which Network Solutions, Inc.
wanted to cut off use of their domain name and give it to one of the many
trademark owners of the term "Road Runner." This was the first case of its
kind, and Road Runner Computer Systems prevailed. Mr. Oppedahl recently
litigated a case in which three different Web sites used his law firm's name
in their META-tags eight times over 11 different pages, presumably to
increase the probability that their sites would appear in searches involving
Oppedahl's name. Due to Oppedahl's efforts, the offending companies are
permanently enjoined from the use of Oppedahl & Larson's law firm name on
their Web pages.
For those wishing to bone-up on trademark and intellecutal property issues
before the meeting, refer to Oppedahl & Larson's Web page
http://www.patents.com for lots of information.
Meeting Location
The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users Group will be in room 123 of
the CU Academic Computing Center building at Arapahoe and Marine Streets in
Boulder. Marine St intersects Arapahoe at 38th St; the Computing Center is
on the southwest corner.
Our Last Meeting
At the last meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users Group Bob Gray did a
presentation on Source Code UNIX.
See the previous meetings page on the Fruug web site for more detail.
Upcoming Meetings
Our next meeting will be:
-
On June 17 Kevlin Henney, who did our January talk on Designing
Distributed Object Systems with CORBA will be in town again and has
offered to talk on Java Patterns.
Contact the FRUUG Executive Committee at fruug at fruug.org if you have other
interesting topic ideas or are interested in presenting a fruug talk.
FRUUG Library Notes
This Month Addison Wesley has sent us the Java Developer's Almanac for 1998,
covering JDK 1.2.
You may check books out using your business card as your library card; you
must be on the membership list to check books out. Books are due at the
meeting following the one in which they are checked out. If you don't return
your library books by the next meeting, you might find yourself on our
overdue book list. We count on you returning books on time so that other
members may have the chance to use them as well.
FRUUG CONTACTS
The FRUUG "Executive Committee" is currently:
- Tom Cargill (cargill at fruug.org, 494-3239), independent consultant
- Mark Carlson (mac at fruug.org, 682-6473), Red Cape Software
- Dick Dunn (rcd at fruug.org), Artifex Software Inc.
- Steve Gaede (gaede at fruug.org, 444-9114), Lone Eagle Systems, Inc
- Carol Meier (meier at fruug.org, 499-5940), .profile Consulting
- Bill Meine (wmeine at fruug.org, 796-7100), Sun Microsystems
- Joe VanAndel (vanandel at fruug.org, 497-2071), NCAR
- Wally Wedel (wwedel at fruug.org, 804-3073), Sun Microsystems
For FRUUG membership information, more contact information, and an ASCII copy
of the most recent meeting announcement, send mail to fruug-info at fruug.org
and you'll receive an automatic reply...or point your WWW browser to
http://www.fruug.org/fruug
For more FRUUG information, changes, additions, or deletions from the
electronic or US Mail mailing list, please send your request to
fruug-request at fruug.org.
If there are comments you'd like to send to the entire executive committee, you
can reach us with the address: fruug at fruug.org.
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