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 FSFE is a partner organisation of NGI, a coalition of non-profit organisations from across Europe. Funded by the EC, it provides grants to work on new ideas and technologies that contribute to the establishment of the Next Generation Internet. The FSFE provides legal support for these projects.
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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 part of these European consortium 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, we are promoting the REUSE specification as an important element for licensing compliance.
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The Legal Network is a neutral, non-partisan, group of experts involved in Free Software legal issues with currently 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.
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 represented
the interests of Free Software developer as a public interest organisation
who cannot be bought off. Thanks to the excellent work by all involved
parties, the case was 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 beginning of the standardisation process for Microsoft's Office
Open XML - OOXML (hereafter MS-OOXML), the FSFE has raised serious doubts
about whether MS-OOXML can be considered open. FSFE was the first to raise
the issue in the community, led the movement against the standardisation
of MS-OOXML, and has been closely following developments over the years.
The June 29th 2007 release of version 3 of the GNU General Public
License (GPL) marked the end of an eighteen month public
consultation process. During this time, the FSFE worked to raise
awareness of the changes proposed for the licence, to help the
community to participate in the public consultation, and to
document the ongoing discussion to make this topic as accessible
as possible.
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.