Intellectual property-related issues were a topic avoided by governments during the 2003-2005 World Summit on the Information Society, which gave way to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). But at the second IGF in Rio de Janeiro last week there were several IP-related workshops.

The Software Freedom Law Center has filed two more GPL infringement lawsuits on behalf of an open-source software project. The second-ever GPL lawsuit alleges that Xterasys and High-Gan Antennas failed to honor "source-code transparency," in violation of Busybox's GPLv2 license.

Several free software writers have
called Iliad, one of the main telecom companies in France, to respect
their work, and a judicial proceeding has begun to demand the respect
of their licence. This action follows repeated refusals of Iliad to
publish the source code of the Free Software included in their Freebox.

A number of states including California and New York filed legal briefs Friday supporting their earlier request to extend the government's restrictive antitrust oversight of Microsoft Corp. The states said in a court filing that extended oversight of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is necessary for "meaningful marketplace competition."

Recently, Blue GNU reported that the Xming software is released under the terms of the GNU GPLv2, and that the developer might be violating its terms. Harrison now states his program is no longer under the GPL. So here's an update.

Sun Microsystems will release its xVM Ops Center virtualisation management application under the General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3), the company revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

"A California man filed suit in state court Tuesday against internet service provider Comcast, arguing that the company's secret use of technology to limit peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent violates federal computer fraud laws, their user contracts and anti-fraudulent advertising statutes..."