Intellectual Property Law

Not an IP or IT law story as such, but here's a quick heads up on an emerging mobile phone trend that may be of interest to IMPACT® readers.

I'm not talking about sleek new designs for phones, interesting as they may be (and capable of being protected by registering their designs, either as UK Registered Designs or Community Registered Designs). Instead, the focus of this post is on mobile phone operating systems.

Having captured a fairly respectable share of the desktop PC operating system market, the open source and free software movement is now looking to do the same with the operating system market for mobile phones. At present, that market is dominated by Symbian, whose OSs are found in the phones of most major manufacturers.

There are 2 main groups producing free software/open source OSs for mobile phones. The first is the LiMo Foundation, the 'LiMo' standing for 'Linux Mobile'. LiMo has announced that its OS will be launched this month and at last month's Mobile Phone Congress reportedly announced that 18 phones would be running on LiMo. The LiMo OS is subject to a standard licence called the "Foundation Public Licence". I haven't read it in enough detail to see whether it qualifies as "free software" or "open source", but the FPL in essence does appear to fall into at least one of these two categories. People producing software for LiMo phones don't have to licence that software under the FPL, but LiMo's IPR policy does contain various rules about  licenses.

Grabbing more technology news headlines has been Android, the "open handset alliance project" launched and funded by Google, and sometimes referred to as the "Googlephone". Although various major phone manufacturers including Samsung have already announced they will be launching phones that run on Android, Symbian has already said that it's not worried about Android. Google has issued a licence for Android with some open source characteristics, but looking to be very much Google's baby. Being in control of the Android site and licence, Google also has control over Android's IP policies going forwards. The Googlephone does look like it could prove to be a very nice OS; Pocketpicks has spotted a video of a phone running Android on the BBC website.