Legal Support Activities
As a non-profit, non-governmental organisation, Free Software
Foundation Europe works to create general understanding and
support for Free Software and Open Standards. The following
activities are concrete actions that we take in the areas of
public awareness, policy advocacy and legal support.
Since its foundation in 2001, the FSFE has been working every
single day to further Free Software in Europe and beyond. With
our concrete activities, based upon the three pillars of our work, we
focus on protecting and extending user rights. Some of our
actions run for many years, some are aimed at short-term
developments, but all are part of our mission: empower users
to control technology.
Another major part of our work consists of continuous engagement
and background work. We are present at dozens of conferences per year,
support and maintain an excellent community and
provide it with helpful resources. Furthermore, we are a
prominent contact point for all questions and enquiries around
software freedom, Open Standards, and user rights. We also provide basic education resources on Free Software legal and licensing issues.
Learn more about legal
issues in Free Software and our general approach in this
area.
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The FSFE is running a project to make licensing easy for humans and machines alike. It solves a fundamental issue that Free Software licensing has at the very source: what license is a file licensed under, and who owns the copyright? REUSE provides easy recommendations in three steps that help users, developers and legal professionals.
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The Legal Network is a neutral, non-partisan, group of experts in
different fields involved in Free Software legal issues.
Currently the Legal Network has several hundreds of participants
from different legal systems, academic backgrounds and
affiliations. The aim of the Legal Network is to promote
discussion and foster better knowledge of the legal constructs
that back Free Software. The conversations on the Legal Network
are intended to be dynamic, thought-provoking and up to speed
with the most recent developments. Since 2007, we have been
conducting the annual Legal and Licencing Workshop (LLW) which
has become the world’s foremost gathering of lawyers,
technologists, and thought leaders on Free Software legal and
licensing topics in an informal and confidential atmosphere.
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The FSFE’s Licence Questions mailing list is our group of
volunteers dedicated to provide help with Free Software licences
and compliance. If you need advice on what Free Software licence
you should use, or if you want to know more about what rights you
have over a piece of Free Software, you can contact us.
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The FSFE is working with 9 European organizations to promote and raise awareness about the importance of Free Software, Open Data, and Open Hardware among academia, business, industry, and innovation supporting organizations. As a big part of our work with the ZOOOM Initiative, we are promoting the REUSE specification as an important element for licensing compliance.
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The FSFE is a partner organisation of NGI, a coalition of various
not-for-profit organisations from across Europe. Funded by the
European Commmission, NGI provides grants to individual
researchers and developers, as well as teams that wish to work on
new ideas and technologies that contribute to the establishment
of the Next Generation Internet. The FSFE provides legal support
for projects that improve openness, inclusivity, transparency,
privacy, cooperation, and protection of data.
More Legal Activities
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The Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) allows software projects to assign and consolidate copyrights to a named fiduciary, for the effective management of their copyright status by this fiduciary. This permits developers to focus on making great applications, rather than spending their time dealing with legal administration. While the FSFE no longer accepts new projects under the Fiduciary Programme, we continue to offer customisable versions of the Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) for your use.
We are working towards a world where software does what software
users want it to do. For this, software users must be able to
participate in the development and distribution of the software.
Software patents block this goal by adding legal and financial
risks to software development and distribution and by giving the
patent holders legal power to completely prohibit software
developers from using the patented ideas.
In 2001 the European Union started investigating Microsoft's
dominant position in the market for desktop operating systems.
The FSFE played two key roles in this case. First, we represented
the interests of Free Software developers. Second, we are a
public interest organisation who cannot be bought off. Thanks to
the excellent work by all involved parties, the case has been won
in all rulings up to the European Court of Justice in 2012.
The Slovak company EURA Slovakia has been facing EUR 5600 in
fines because it did not buy and use the Microsoft Windows
operating system for submitting electronic tax reports. Slovak
tax administration gave EURA only two options: either to buy and
use Microsoft Windows or face the fines. The FSFE assisted in
this case to advocate for platform-neutral solutions for such
procedures instead. Unfortunately, the court decided against Free
Software and Open Standards, but we were able to raise awareness
about these wrongdoings in Slovakia and beyond.
Can a company modify GPL-licensed software on a third-party
device? The router manufacturer AVM accused Cybits of copyright
infringement and trademark claims because they modify the
original router firmware which is largely based on the Linux
kernel. Together with gpl-violations.org we successfully
convinced the court that the provisions in the GPL license are
binding: software under this license can be freely modified and
installed even if it is shipped as part of an embedded device's
firmware.
Since the very beginning of the standardisation process for
Microsoft's Office Open XML - OOXML (hereinafter MS-OOXML), the
FSFE has expressed serious doubts about whether MS-OOXML could be
considered as open, if even as a standard at all. The FSFE first
raised the issue in the community and led the movement against
the standardisation of MS-OOXML, following closely over the years
the relevant developments.
Au cours de l'année 2006 a eu lieu un processus de consultation publique pour la rédaction de la version 3 de la GNU General Public License. Cette licence, couramment appelée "la GPL", est de loin la licence la plus utilisée pour les Logiciels Libres. La Free Software Foundation Europe soutient ce processus de consultation en sensibilisant le public sur la GPL, en facilitant la participation des gens au processus, en publiant des informations permettant aux autres de favoriser cette sensibilisation et en organisant des conférences.
The AGNULA project aimed at the creation of a fully functional, entirely
Free Software GNU/Linux distribution for professional audio
users. It is a project run by key players in the audio field
with funding by the European Commission. The FSFE as a
partner of this project is taking care of the legal issues, the
long-term aspects and also making sure the Free Software
community interests are heard.