- Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society If you work in the field of information technology, intellectual property is central to your job - but dealing with the complexity of the legal system can be mind-boggling. This book is for anyone who wants to understand how the legal system relating to intellectual property rights for code and other content. Written by an intellectual property lawyer who is also a programmer, Intellectual Property and Open Source helps you understand the rights of patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, and licensing, with special focus on the issues surrounding the development of open source and GPL. This book answers questions such as: How open source and intellectual property work together? What is the importance of intellectual property related to the issues that most when starting a business or open source projects? Intellectual Property and Open Source friendly, easy to follow the law review that programmers, system administrators, graphic designers, and many others would find important.