Rotarian Monica Lee introduced her husband, Ed Molyneaux, who serves as Senior Legal Counsel for Adobe, Inc. in San Jose. (Watch the video for Monica’s outstanding description of Ed’s background.) Ed grew up in upstate New York, attended Cornell before transferring to Stanford where he earned a degree in History. After a gap year, before the term even existed, in Taiwan, Ed earned a law degree from the former Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley. He speaks Chinese and when he worked for a PR firm, Ed did commercials in Chinese. He is also a musician. Ed noted that he went from being a PI (public injury) attorney to an IP (intellectual property) attorney. After working in several Silicon Valley companies, Ed has been at Adobe, Inc. for the past 13 years.
At Adobe, Ed specializes in software licensing. He started with “What is a license?” that he defined as “A license is an agreement which someone who has a right to stop you from doing something agrees not to stop you from doing it, subject to certain conditions.” Moving on from this definition, Ed described the types of software and licenses:
- Shrink wrap
- Click wrap or click-to-accept
- Enterprise software license (companies are more willing to negotiate this type of license because there is a direct relationship to the dollars spent.
- On premise software
- Cloud software that includes on-demand and managed services
Next, Ed reviewed in detail (watch the video) the key aspects of a software license, which include
- License grant
- License term
- Maintenance and Support
- License metrics
- License restrictions
- Indemnification obligations
- Audit rights
- Source code vs. Object Code
- Third-Party Notice
- GPL (Gnu Public License), which is sometimes referred to a “copyleft” rather than “copyright”.
Click here to watch Ed’s complete presentation.