Developers group forming to license Java applets

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 (https://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.

Certification “is one of the big challenges we raise when we talk about Java,” he said. A licensing scheme “gives you place to point the finger if the Java applet doesn’t work. So this would perhaps give people some reassurance that they’re getting it from a registered source, and that would imply that there’s some sort of quality assurance backing it up.”

One analyst questioned why the licensing of Java applets couldn’t be handled by the administrator of the server on which the applets reside.

Some Web sites require a user to register upon log-on, and even OEMs handle the licensing for software they bundle onto systems, noted Paul Cubbage, analyst at Dataquest Inc. in San Jose, CA.

“There may be times when you want to download an applet and nothing else, but when you download an applet you get a Web site and you ought to enforce [licensing] there,” Cubbage said. “Any Web site that has a way of charging you has a mechanism in place. All they’ve got to do is put the code into the page you’re accessing …”

However, Ezor pointed out that the end-user, not the Web site administrator, is operating the applet.

One Java developer disagreed and said that practically nothing, except “crippling” or hardcoding restrictions into the applet, will effectively prevent copying and misuse of an applet.

“Basically I just don’t think that legal remedies have been particularly useful in preventing software piracy,” said Ian McFarland, principal of Neo Communication, a Web publisher in San Francisco. “It’s already illegal to steal software, but people do and licensing agreements don’t really change that.

“It’s not the end-user who is going to be misusing somebody’s applets,” he added. “It’s an administrator somewhere who wants to use ‘X’ applet on his site.”

McFarland said he and most other Java developers put copyrights into their applet code to show ownership, saying that people will be less likely to plagiarize if they see a copyright notice.

“There is a culture on the ‘Net where you share things,” he said. “But there are situations where a developer has put a lot of development time into an applet and doesn’t want it readily usable unless there is a specific license.”

Ezor pointed out that copyrighting applets doesn’t address the warranty issue because it doesn’t specify terms for use. A licensing agreement, on the other hand, is a contract and thus provides more protection for developers, he said.