As part of the SmartBiGG program trainings, on 8 September 2018 Vircon Legal co-founder Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu presented on “Law and Intellectual Property Rights for Entrepreneurs,” together with Okan Şencan.
Software, open source and the things you cannot register
Software is protected as a literary work from the moment it is written, with no registration required — which sounds convenient until a dispute turns on who wrote what and when. Version control history, dated deliverables and signed assignments are what convert that automatic protection into something provable. The corollary is that a company using contractors without written terms may have a product it cannot fully claim.
Open-source components deserve a deliberate decision rather than a default. A permissive licence and a copyleft licence lead to different commercial futures, and the obligations attach to distribution, so they surface exactly when a company starts shipping to customers or preparing for diligence. Maintaining a dependency inventory is cheap; discovering an incompatible licence during a funding round is not. Where registration is unavailable or unsuitable, trade-secret discipline does the work: Intellectual Property, Technology Law and Startup & Scaleup Advisory.
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