We hope everyone is enjoying Memorial Day and is celebrating in a contextually appropriate manner. We’ve still got an episode for you today though, and we touch on a couple topics. Starting off, we review a little of the news from GDPR launch day, which was this past May 25th. This kicks off the new EU privacy law, and it has far-reaching implications for web developers all over the world. It’s a tough topic, featuring a huge law that is trying to do the right things, but in ways that do create interesting burdens for site operators. We’ll look at visiting this topic specifically in a future episode in a couple of months, once we’ve had time to see what the fallout looks like. In the mean time, we’ve included some links below to help you along with that.
- 13 things to know about the GDPR
- These popular sites are dark in the EU thanks to GDPR
- GDPR Rules as a US Response to Cambridge Analytica?
- Facebook and Google hit with $8.8 billion in lawsuits on day one of GDPR
Our main topic today covers copyright and licensing as it applies to web development. We’ll repeat here the caveat made in the show – Michael and Aaron aren’t lawyers. Plus, you know, they were drinking while talking, so it’s possible (even likely), they got something wrong at some point. Feel free to leave a comment below if you want to correct them.
That being said, understanding how copyright can impact your work as a developer or designer can be a major player in whether or not you end up in court defending your process. Not only that, but we talk about how to figure out how you choose the right license to release your projects under. Navigating all the licenses can be daunting, but we try to give you a very basic overview that should help you in figuring out what fits your future work best. This will also help you understand what it means when you contribute to a project that has a particular license versus another.
Followup Resources
- 5 Biggest Copyright Pitfalls for Web Designers courtesy of Tuts+
- Choose a License helper tool curated by GitHub
- Company Sues Over Unauthorized Use of Its Fonts reviews a common typography habit at Lawyers.com
- Congress’ Latest Move to Extend Copyright Protection is Misguided at Wired, by noted IP lawyer Lawrence Lessig
- Difference Between Different Types Of Open Sources Licenses at FossBytes
- Open source license usage on GitHub.com
- Patent, Copyright & Trademark resources collected by NOLO
- (re)Mix010gy was Michael’s presentation on Creative Commons and content reuse
- SAP’s CLA text available on GitHub
- Who Owns the Copyright for An Open Source Project helps break down the complexities of open source projects at haacked.com
This episode of The Drunken UX Podcast brought to you by nuCloud.