MongoDB’s lawsuit against FerretDB has generally been understood as a dispute over FerretDB’s use of the MongoDB name and brand, or over marketing claims such as “MongoDB compatible” and “an alternative to MongoDB.” MongoDB itself has strongly argued that FerretDB’s marketing misleads developers and damages the value of the MongoDB…
Where Japanese IP Advice Can Miss Contracts, Corporate Practice, and Community Norms I regularly receive requests for advice on the use of licenses, primarily Open Source licenses, and often have occasion to provide my own interpretation. In doing so, I sometimes refer to the interpretations and views of outside experts.…
Three years ago, OSI began the process of creating the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). I was involved in this long journey from the beginning as a volunteer, but at the time my strongest concern was simply that we must not undermine the values of the original Open Source community,…
Can AI be used to reimplement software with nearly the same functionality, and then even change its license as a result, in what might be described as a form of license washing? This issue has been discussed repeatedly for some time. Yet, setting aside discussions of reimplementation for research purposes,…
California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), approved by Governor Newsom in October 2025, sets out a statewide age assurance framework for operating systems and app stores. It requires operating system providers to present an age and date-of-birth declaration interface during account setup and to provide an API that can…
Copyright issues in AI model training and generated outputs are widely discussed, but less attention is paid to how copyright licenses, the actual mechanism for granting permission, shape these workflows. Unlike traditional software, which is often described as a one-to-one relationship between source code and executable code, AI involves three…
Recently, regarding the open-weights AI model “Nemotron 3” released by NVIDIA, there are scattered media reports mistakenly describing it as open source. Because there is concern that these reports encourage ignoring the usage risks of the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement (version dated October 24, 2025; hereinafter referred to as…
When GitHub Copilot first appeared, many developers viewed it as an assistive tool for coding. The honest impression of most developers was likely that while it was useful, it was not a tool to which one could entrust the entire coding process. However, in this year of 2025, the term…
When GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021, the fact that its training data included a vast amount of Open Source code publicly available on GitHub attracted significant attention, sparking lively debates regarding licensing. While there were issues concerning conditions such as attribution required by most licenses, there was a particularly…
The Munich I Regional Court has delivered a sweeping victory for GEMA, Germany’s music rights organization, in its lawsuit against OpenAI, the operator of ChatGPT. The court substantially granted GEMA’s claims for injunctive relief, disclosure of information, and damages. While significant as OpenAI’s first major legal defeat, the ruling is…
The debate surrounding the Codes of Conduct (CoC) adopted by Open Source projects may be reaching a turning point. In September 2025, a controversy erupted over the governance of RubyGems, a cornerstone of the Ruby ecosystem, sending significant ripples through the community. While not directly related, this turmoil served as…
While a previous article detailed the long-held view in the United States that Open Source licenses were not contracts but “unilateral permissions” — a perspective that gained legal validation in Jacobsen v. Katzer — the ruling in that very case was also a crucial step on the path toward recognizing…
In Japan, the common view is to treat an Open Source license as a license agreement, or a contract. This is also the case in the EU. However, in the United States—the origin point for almost every aspect of Open Source—an Open Source license has long been considered not a…
Although the number of AI models distributed under Open Source licenses is increasing, it can be said that AI systems in which all related components, including training data, are open are still in a developmental stage, even as a few promising systems have emerged. In this context, this past May,…
QEMU has formally adopted a policy that rejects contributions containing code generated by AI tools. The core reason is the concern that such AI-generated code cannot satisfy the requirements of the Developer’s Certificate of Origin (DCO), which contributors rely on to attest to the validity of their patches. What, then,…
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Where Japanese IP Advice Can Miss Contracts, Corporate Practice, and Community Norms I regularly receive requests for advice on the use of licenses, primarily Open Source licenses, and often have occasion to provide my own interpretation. In doing so, I sometimes refer to the interpretations and views of outside experts. However, I do not often…
Can AI be used to reimplement software with nearly the same functionality, and then even change its license as a result, in what might be described as a form of license washing? This issue has been discussed repeatedly for some time. Yet, setting aside discussions of reimplementation for research purposes, I do not believe there…
Copyright issues in AI model training and generated outputs are widely discussed, but less attention is paid to how copyright licenses, the actual mechanism for granting permission, shape these workflows. Unlike traditional software, which is often described as a one-to-one relationship between source code and executable code, AI involves three interlocking layers: input data, the…
Recently, regarding the open-weights AI model “Nemotron 3” released by NVIDIA, there are scattered media reports mistakenly describing it as open source. Because there is concern that these reports encourage ignoring the usage risks of the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement (version dated October 24, 2025; hereinafter referred to as the NVIDIA License), which is…
When GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021, the fact that its training data included a vast amount of Open Source code publicly available on GitHub attracted significant attention, sparking lively debates regarding licensing. While there were issues concerning conditions such as attribution required by most licenses, there was a particularly high volume of discourse suggesting…
In Japan, the common view is to treat an Open Source license as a license agreement, or a contract. This is also the case in the EU. However, in the United States—the origin point for almost every aspect of Open Source—an Open Source license has long been considered not a contract, but a “unilateral permission”…
Although the number of AI models distributed under Open Source licenses is increasing, it can be said that AI systems in which all related components, including training data, are open are still in a developmental stage, even as a few promising systems have emerged. In this context, this past May, the Linux Foundation, in collaboration…
While examining the licensing details of Google’s Gemma model, I noticed a potentially puzzling phenomenon: you can freely assign a license to the model’s outputs, yet depending on how those outputs are used, the original Terms of Use might suddenly propagate to the resulting work. Outputs vs. Model Derivatives The Gemma Terms of Use distinguish…
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