The Legal Status of Free Licenses

Student: Baykova Viktoriya

Educational Programme: Information Technology and Intellectual Property Law (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2020

The master's thesis deals with the legal status of free licenses is aimed at determining their role as a special institution in the intellectual property system and introducing the concept of “free license” into the current legislation because currently the legislation contains "open license", which is not identical. This creates a gap between the legislator and representatives of the IT sector, for whom such regulation is extremely important. The work raises questions about the concept of the term, the delimitation of free licenses from cases of free use and the public domain, legislative regulation and judicial practice. Also, licenses such as BSD, MIT, Apache, GPL, Creative Commons are examined in detail. As a result of the work, conclusions were drawn about the need to introduce into the current legislation the concept of free licenses, as well as amendments to Conflict-of-laws rules.

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