Copyright, Licensing and Patents for Scientific Software

Carlo Piana will outline the legal protection of software in terms of copyright, patents and other applicable laws, from an historical and practical viewpoint. Moving from the legal background, he will introduce the concepts of Free and open source software (FOSS) licensing and practice in different areas, from traditional C-style programming, to the embedded and Software as a Service (cloud) worlds. He will cover the different licensing models under the different copyleft categories, and the business models that he have encountered in his legal and activists' life, providing the basic tools to understand licensing and compliance when using and working with FOSS. Carlo Piana is an IT lawyer based in Milano, partner and founder of Array (https://array.eu), serves as external General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation Europe (https://fsfe.org)