About this site
The purpose of iusmentis.com is, put briefly, "to explain the law to techies, and tech to laywers." A large part of the site focuses on intellectual property and software-related information, including Open source software.
The sitemap offers an overview of all available materials.
Law and technology
Intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks and database rights) is becoming more and more important in the field of computers, programming and ICT in general. A lot of legislation regarding ICT-related issues has been passed in the last few years. Additionally, the number of lawsuits in this field has increased significantly as well. This makes the topic very important for anyone working in this field. This site aims to serve as a starting point for learning about intellectual property laws and principles for anyone with an ICT-related background.
Technology and law
A second objective of this site is to offer some insight in how technologies such as the domain naming system or e-commerce work, and how they can be regarded from a legal point of view.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Jolie for her useful feedback and for her work on the site's logo. Also my thanks to Wouter Slegers for his comments and for (knowingly or not) serving as a beta-reader.
Feedback
The site iusmentis.com is maintained by Arnoud Engelfriet. Feel free to make any suggestions, comments and/or additions you may have. However, due to the volume of mail I receive daily, I cannot answer every individual question mailed to me.
Conditions on use
The materials on this site may be used by anyone pursuant to the license conditions. Please let me know how you use it, and feel free to suggest improvements on structure and/or content that would make your usage easier. All resources are originally written in DocBook XML, and so should be easy to convert to any format. See my notes on the Iusmentis site management tool in PHP.
The name iusmentis
The name "ius mentis" is Latin for "legal rights on mental things", which I think is a better term for rights granted by copyright, patent or trademark law than "intellectual property". The very name intellectual property is, in my opinion, biased by referring to products of the mind as "property", i.e. something one can own. While this is a common way of thinking, it is certainly not the only possibility. And I do not want to appear prejudiced towards this way of thinking.