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Developers group forming to license Java applets

A new scheme for applet licensing emerges as law tries to keep up with technology

By Elinor Mills, JavaWorld.com, 05/01/96

A copyright attorney is spearheading an effort to devise a way to license Java applets, which are distributed online and thus more difficult to protect as intellectual property.

Licensing agreements are also needed to protect developers from liability, said Jonathan Ezor, a new media attorney at Davis & Gilbert in New York City and general counsel for jade.org: The Java Developers Organization (http://www.jade.org).

Packaged software comes with a printed license agreement and downloaded software includes an on-screen license agreement that addresses copyright and warranty, including "how much and how little the developer can be liable for," he said.

"But for most Java applets, they just run. You never install an applet. You load a Web page and the applet is downloaded automatically, so the ordinary models for licenses don't work," he said. "There's no packaging. There's no installation, and for a user to have to click through an 'I agree' screen for every applet on every page, it won't work."

Ezor's group is proposing a licensing method whereby the user would agree on screen to the terms of a licensing "contract" when first encountering a Java applet, and that agreement would last the duration of the user's browser session or some other pre-determined period of time that the user is online.

Members of jade.org would have the option of having their applets covered by the form license agreements or not, and applets of non-members would not be affected. Code in the members' applets would scan information in the user's computer, possibly in RAM, and detect whether or not the user has entered into the licensing agreement during the browser session. If not, the member applets would not download.

Eventually, the organization would help Java developers with mechanisms for collecting payments if they want to charge for use of the applets. However, the licensing agreements would work the same for all applets whether they are free or not. Meanwhile, the developers would maintain the applets and jade.org would maintain the licensing agreements.

"This sounds like a good step in terms of giving developers a way to protect their intellectual property," said George Paolini, a spokesman for Sun Microsystems Inc. which created the popular Java object-oriented programming environment. "I think we'll see more of these sorts of services cropping up because I think people see the potential for the Internet and the Web to be a mechanism to access software, and in order for that to happen the developers need to be reassured that they can protect their property and users need to be reassured" of the quality of the software.

Although Java applets are only in the beta stage right now, they are available in full source code and being widely reused, he said. One common use is for creating LED-class ticker tape animations, such as those that display information on stocks, that appear at the edge of the screen when particular Web sites are accessed.

Although the need for a licensing mechanism for the applets, which are really just small bits of code that perform specific functions, is predicated on their becoming ubiquitous, their inherent ease of distribution poses a problem, according to Richard Villars, an analyst at International Data Corp. in Framingham, MA.

 

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