European Union has been harmonizing intellectual property rights (IPRs) legislation for over a de... more European Union has been harmonizing intellectual property rights (IPRs) legislation for over a decade. Harmonized business regulation is thought to be necessary for well functioning internal markets. Regional legal barriers and uncertainty about regulation in general may increase transaction costs and cause market failures. Yet it is anything but certain that the new Eastern European member states would benefit from common market regulation. We argue that harmonization benefits status quo, i.e. merely protects the interests of incumbents, before offering equal opportunities for new entrants. This trend is most visible in the regulation of rapidly evolving information technology industry. Therefore, we use the intellectual property rights regulation of software as an example.
The EU Directive harmonising copyright, Directive 2001/29/EC, has been implemented in all META-NO... more The EU Directive harmonising copyright, Directive 2001/29/EC, has been implemented in all META-NORD countries. The licensing schemas of open content/open source and META-SHARE as well as CLARIN are discussed shortly. The status of the licensing of tools and resources available at the consortium partners are outlined. The aim of the article is to compare a set of open content and open source license and provide some guidance on the optimal use of licenses provided by META-NET and CLARIN for licensing the tools and ...
Open source and free software products have challenged established licensing models for many type... more Open source and free software products have challenged established licensing models for many types of mass mar- ket software products. Especially markets in operating systems, development tools, web servers and databases have significant open source and free software products. A software company that wishes to benefit from the non- technical innovations in open source and free software licenses has to
One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license managem... more One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license management. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the current European copyright system is designed to a large extent to satisfy the commercial actors, e.g. publishers, record companies etc. This means that the scope and duration of the rights are very extensive and there are even certain forms of protection that do not exist elsewhere in the world, e.g. database right. On the other hand, the exceptions for research and teaching are typically very narrow.
One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license managem... more One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license management. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the current European copyright system is designed to a large extent to satisfy the commercial actors, e.g. publishers, record companies etc. This means that the scope and duration of the rights are very extensive and there are even certain forms of protection that do not exist elsewhere in the world, e.g. database right. On the other hand, the exceptions for research and teaching are typically very narrow.
Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Electronic commerce - ICEC '05, 2005
This article starts by considering the global framework of current open source migration. We show... more This article starts by considering the global framework of current open source migration. We show that the fight against software piracy is most likely speeding up the adoption especially in the developing countries. The situation is somewhat different in those parts of the world, which have lower piracy rates. There, political lobbying seems to offer the major push for open source software. This brings us to study the actual open source software adoption in the Finland, which is both the home of Linux and also one of the most advances information societies with little piracy. The outcome is rather surprising -the Finnish government is currently ignoring open source. The results we have got from our a survey to all Finnish municipalities and from additional expanded interviews shows that there is currently high demand and growing interest for open source solutions within the Finnish municipalities but the government (by ignoring the issue) and the private sector (being mainly committed to proprietary solutions) are not able to fill the needs. We propose that the governments in the rich countries should in fact learn from developing countries and have a more proactive policy approach to open source software.
The idea of alternative compensation methods for recording artists has gained increasing populari... more The idea of alternative compensation methods for recording artists has gained increasing popularity as Internet copying has started to seriously threaten record sales. We start this article by looking at the general theory on alternatives to copyright royalties and show that recording artist income is in practise not dependent on record sales. Then we move forward and map the features of the current alternative proposals and construct yet another iteration of a levy-based compensation method. As an example, we analyze what our model would imply for Finland. In the end we reflect on the idea of a levy-based compensation method to the current predictions of technical advances in communication networks and note that the traditional copyright royalty model is seriously threatened by tremendous personal copying covering practically all the music ever created. We conclude this article by discussing what this will mean for the alternative compensation proposals and the music industry in ge...
The software development has become even more complicated for IT-companies and users of software.... more The software development has become even more complicated for IT-companies and users of software. The rising popularity of open source in all areas of software development and usage is resulting in a need to evaluate more options in software procurement than before. This paper highlights some of the recent international and domestic research on open source deployment and gives some recommendations as to what official stand Finland should take.
This paper describes the impact of different open source copyright licensing arrangements to the ... more This paper describes the impact of different open source copyright licensing arrangements to the competition in microcomputer operating system markets. We compare the historical evolution of the licensing policies of Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and GNU/Linux operating systems. We argue that open source and free software licensing has been one of the most important changing factors in the microcomputer operating system markets in the recent years. We have seen both new entrants in the relatively closed markets and renewed business models by incumbents. However, there has been no single open source strategy but merely all market players have adopted open source into their operating system strategy in one form or other.
Proceedings of the 14th International Academic MindTrek Conference on Envisioning Future Media Environments - MindTrek '10, 2010
Complications emerge when various open source software components, governed by different licenses... more Complications emerge when various open source software components, governed by different licenses, are used in the same software system. For various reasons, these licenses introduce different privileges and requirements on the use and distribution of composed code, and are therefore often fundamentally incompatible with each other when combined arbitrarily. Consequently the way the different components can be integrated requires attention at the level of software architecture. In this paper, we introduce open source legality patterns -architectural design decisions motivated by legal concerns associated with open source licensing issues and licenses themselves. Towards the end of the paper, we also review some related work and discuss why it is important to create common guidelines for designs that mix and match different open source systems and proprietary software, and provide directions for future work.
One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license managem... more One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license management. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the current European copyright system is designed to a large extent to satisfy the commercial actors, e.g. publishers, record companies etc. This means that the scope and duration of the rights are very extensive and there are even certain forms of protection that do not exist elsewhere in the world, e.g. database right. On the other hand, the exceptions for research and teaching are typically very narrow.
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Electronic commerce - ICEC '08, 2008
The main source of consumer surplus is in transition from mechanical devices to software and othe... more The main source of consumer surplus is in transition from mechanical devices to software and other digital content. The current dualistic consumer protection scheme, which means adequate protection for physical goods and almost non-existent protection for software and other digital content, will not be sustainable in the long run. To make the situation more complicated, questions pertaining to the rights of users of copyrighted content are increasingly important as the regulation forms another framework with direct relevance for consumer protection-both software and content are typically protected with copyright.
This article discusses the problem that open source software can not support compatibility standa... more This article discusses the problem that open source software can not support compatibility standards, which have patent royalties. As the use of open source continues to grow, the article asks whether it makes sense to include a compatibility exception in patent law or require royalty-free licenses in formal standardization organizations and procurement policies. The article proposes that the answer may not be in the patent policies -be they from the government or from industry standard bodies -but perhaps in the practices of individual companies. While some companies want to collect licenses for their "intellectual property" no matter what, one can also observe that some major information technology companies have recently dedicated patents on a royalty-free basis to the use of open source developers without any standardization or regulatory pressures. Encouraging such company practices might be the best option for a government if it considers patent royalties on compatibility standards a policy problem.
The META-NORD project has contributed to an open infrastructure for language resources (data and ... more The META-NORD project has contributed to an open infrastructure for language resources (data and tools) under the META-NET umbrella. This paper presents the key objectives of META-NORD and reports on the results achieved in the first year of the project. META-NORD has mapped and described the national language technology landscape in the Nordic and Baltic countries in terms of language use, language technology and resources, main actors in the academy, industry, government and society; identified and collected the first batch of language resources in the Nordic and Baltic countries; documented, processed, linked, and upgraded the identified language resources to agreed standards and guidelines. The three horizontal multilingual actions in META-NORD are overviewed in this paper: linking and validating Nordic and Baltic wordnets, the harmonisation of multilingual Nordic and Baltic treebanks, and consolidating multilingual terminology resources across European countries. This paper also touches upon intellectual property rights for the sharing of language resources.
This paper describes the impact of different open source copyright licensing arrangements to the ... more This paper describes the impact of different open source copyright licensing arrangements to the competition in microcomputer operating system markets. We compare the historical evolution of the licensing policies of Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and GNU/Linux operating systems. We argue that open source and free software licensing has been one of the most important changing factors in the microcomputer operating system markets in the recent years. We have seen both new entrants in the relatively closed markets and renewed business models by incumbents. However, there has been no single open source strategy but merely all market players have adopted open source into their operating system strategy in one form or other.
European Union has been harmonizing intellectual property rights (IPRs) legislation for over a de... more European Union has been harmonizing intellectual property rights (IPRs) legislation for over a decade. Harmonized business regulation is thought to be necessary for well functioning internal markets. Regional legal barriers and uncertainty about regulation in general may increase transaction costs and cause market failures. Yet it is anything but certain that the new Eastern European member states would benefit from common market regulation. We argue that harmonization benefits status quo, i.e. merely protects the interests of incumbents, before offering equal opportunities for new entrants. This trend is most visible in the regulation of rapidly evolving information technology industry. Therefore, we use the intellectual property rights regulation of software as an example.
The EU Directive harmonising copyright, Directive 2001/29/EC, has been implemented in all META-NO... more The EU Directive harmonising copyright, Directive 2001/29/EC, has been implemented in all META-NORD countries. The licensing schemas of open content/open source and META-SHARE as well as CLARIN are discussed shortly. The status of the licensing of tools and resources available at the consortium partners are outlined. The aim of the article is to compare a set of open content and open source license and provide some guidance on the optimal use of licenses provided by META-NET and CLARIN for licensing the tools and ...
Open source and free software products have challenged established licensing models for many type... more Open source and free software products have challenged established licensing models for many types of mass mar- ket software products. Especially markets in operating systems, development tools, web servers and databases have significant open source and free software products. A software company that wishes to benefit from the non- technical innovations in open source and free software licenses has to
One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license managem... more One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license management. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the current European copyright system is designed to a large extent to satisfy the commercial actors, e.g. publishers, record companies etc. This means that the scope and duration of the rights are very extensive and there are even certain forms of protection that do not exist elsewhere in the world, e.g. database right. On the other hand, the exceptions for research and teaching are typically very narrow.
One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license managem... more One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license management. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the current European copyright system is designed to a large extent to satisfy the commercial actors, e.g. publishers, record companies etc. This means that the scope and duration of the rights are very extensive and there are even certain forms of protection that do not exist elsewhere in the world, e.g. database right. On the other hand, the exceptions for research and teaching are typically very narrow.
Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Electronic commerce - ICEC '05, 2005
This article starts by considering the global framework of current open source migration. We show... more This article starts by considering the global framework of current open source migration. We show that the fight against software piracy is most likely speeding up the adoption especially in the developing countries. The situation is somewhat different in those parts of the world, which have lower piracy rates. There, political lobbying seems to offer the major push for open source software. This brings us to study the actual open source software adoption in the Finland, which is both the home of Linux and also one of the most advances information societies with little piracy. The outcome is rather surprising -the Finnish government is currently ignoring open source. The results we have got from our a survey to all Finnish municipalities and from additional expanded interviews shows that there is currently high demand and growing interest for open source solutions within the Finnish municipalities but the government (by ignoring the issue) and the private sector (being mainly committed to proprietary solutions) are not able to fill the needs. We propose that the governments in the rich countries should in fact learn from developing countries and have a more proactive policy approach to open source software.
The idea of alternative compensation methods for recording artists has gained increasing populari... more The idea of alternative compensation methods for recording artists has gained increasing popularity as Internet copying has started to seriously threaten record sales. We start this article by looking at the general theory on alternatives to copyright royalties and show that recording artist income is in practise not dependent on record sales. Then we move forward and map the features of the current alternative proposals and construct yet another iteration of a levy-based compensation method. As an example, we analyze what our model would imply for Finland. In the end we reflect on the idea of a levy-based compensation method to the current predictions of technical advances in communication networks and note that the traditional copyright royalty model is seriously threatened by tremendous personal copying covering practically all the music ever created. We conclude this article by discussing what this will mean for the alternative compensation proposals and the music industry in ge...
The software development has become even more complicated for IT-companies and users of software.... more The software development has become even more complicated for IT-companies and users of software. The rising popularity of open source in all areas of software development and usage is resulting in a need to evaluate more options in software procurement than before. This paper highlights some of the recent international and domestic research on open source deployment and gives some recommendations as to what official stand Finland should take.
This paper describes the impact of different open source copyright licensing arrangements to the ... more This paper describes the impact of different open source copyright licensing arrangements to the competition in microcomputer operating system markets. We compare the historical evolution of the licensing policies of Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and GNU/Linux operating systems. We argue that open source and free software licensing has been one of the most important changing factors in the microcomputer operating system markets in the recent years. We have seen both new entrants in the relatively closed markets and renewed business models by incumbents. However, there has been no single open source strategy but merely all market players have adopted open source into their operating system strategy in one form or other.
Proceedings of the 14th International Academic MindTrek Conference on Envisioning Future Media Environments - MindTrek '10, 2010
Complications emerge when various open source software components, governed by different licenses... more Complications emerge when various open source software components, governed by different licenses, are used in the same software system. For various reasons, these licenses introduce different privileges and requirements on the use and distribution of composed code, and are therefore often fundamentally incompatible with each other when combined arbitrarily. Consequently the way the different components can be integrated requires attention at the level of software architecture. In this paper, we introduce open source legality patterns -architectural design decisions motivated by legal concerns associated with open source licensing issues and licenses themselves. Towards the end of the paper, we also review some related work and discuss why it is important to create common guidelines for designs that mix and match different open source systems and proprietary software, and provide directions for future work.
One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license managem... more One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license management. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the current European copyright system is designed to a large extent to satisfy the commercial actors, e.g. publishers, record companies etc. This means that the scope and duration of the rights are very extensive and there are even certain forms of protection that do not exist elsewhere in the world, e.g. database right. On the other hand, the exceptions for research and teaching are typically very narrow.
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Electronic commerce - ICEC '08, 2008
The main source of consumer surplus is in transition from mechanical devices to software and othe... more The main source of consumer surplus is in transition from mechanical devices to software and other digital content. The current dualistic consumer protection scheme, which means adequate protection for physical goods and almost non-existent protection for software and other digital content, will not be sustainable in the long run. To make the situation more complicated, questions pertaining to the rights of users of copyrighted content are increasingly important as the regulation forms another framework with direct relevance for consumer protection-both software and content are typically protected with copyright.
This article discusses the problem that open source software can not support compatibility standa... more This article discusses the problem that open source software can not support compatibility standards, which have patent royalties. As the use of open source continues to grow, the article asks whether it makes sense to include a compatibility exception in patent law or require royalty-free licenses in formal standardization organizations and procurement policies. The article proposes that the answer may not be in the patent policies -be they from the government or from industry standard bodies -but perhaps in the practices of individual companies. While some companies want to collect licenses for their "intellectual property" no matter what, one can also observe that some major information technology companies have recently dedicated patents on a royalty-free basis to the use of open source developers without any standardization or regulatory pressures. Encouraging such company practices might be the best option for a government if it considers patent royalties on compatibility standards a policy problem.
The META-NORD project has contributed to an open infrastructure for language resources (data and ... more The META-NORD project has contributed to an open infrastructure for language resources (data and tools) under the META-NET umbrella. This paper presents the key objectives of META-NORD and reports on the results achieved in the first year of the project. META-NORD has mapped and described the national language technology landscape in the Nordic and Baltic countries in terms of language use, language technology and resources, main actors in the academy, industry, government and society; identified and collected the first batch of language resources in the Nordic and Baltic countries; documented, processed, linked, and upgraded the identified language resources to agreed standards and guidelines. The three horizontal multilingual actions in META-NORD are overviewed in this paper: linking and validating Nordic and Baltic wordnets, the harmonisation of multilingual Nordic and Baltic treebanks, and consolidating multilingual terminology resources across European countries. This paper also touches upon intellectual property rights for the sharing of language resources.
This paper describes the impact of different open source copyright licensing arrangements to the ... more This paper describes the impact of different open source copyright licensing arrangements to the competition in microcomputer operating system markets. We compare the historical evolution of the licensing policies of Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and GNU/Linux operating systems. We argue that open source and free software licensing has been one of the most important changing factors in the microcomputer operating system markets in the recent years. We have seen both new entrants in the relatively closed markets and renewed business models by incumbents. However, there has been no single open source strategy but merely all market players have adopted open source into their operating system strategy in one form or other.
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Papers by Minna Oksanen