After 17 years with SFLC, Legal Director Mishi Choudhary will depart to become General Counsel and Senior Vice-President at Virtru.
Ms. Choudhary began working with SFLC in 2006, held the first SFLC Graduate Fellowship for LLM study at Columbia Law School, and became Legal Director in 2015. She has represented SFLC clients across the entire range of FOSS communities, including the Free Software Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Linux Foundation, Debian, Ethereum, the Apache Software Foundation, and OpenSSL. She founded and developed SFLC’s FOSS Code of Conduct practice, assisting FOSS non-profits and unaffiliated projects to develop and administer CoC policies. She has served as the Code of Conduct mediator for the Linux kernel community, among many others.
On January 13th, 2020, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed a brief amicus curiae in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. before the United States Supreme Court. In its brief, SFLC argues (1) that the Federal Circuit erred in reversing the District Court’s determination that a reasonable jury could find Google’s use of Java in Android was a fair use; (2) that the Supreme Court should ensure the Federal Circuit’s decision that APIs are copyrightable does not establish precedent; and (3) that the Federal Circuit is bound to follow the precedent of the regional courts of appeals on questions of copyright law.
We have received inquiries about a recently-published "Joint Statement by Free Software Foundation Europe and Software Freedom Conservancy Regarding Eben Moglen and Software Freedom Law Center."
The Supreme Court’s April 3rd decision of the long-running dispute between Oracle and Google brings to a last victorious conclusion the free software movement’s legal campaign, which began more than thirty years ago. Though the Justices have only now resolved the issue of API copyright, it was among the first of the legal problems with which FSF and I dealt.