Ars Technica reports on a federal ruling that makes redistributing software in a manner that violates a free software license akin to copyright infringement. I won’t go into the details of why this is such a huge victory, as Ars does a much better job explaining it than I ever could. But this is also a huge victory for us at Northwestern. Many of our projects are released under copyleft-type licenses: GPL, Creative Commons, etc. In fact, this very website is powered by Origami, an open-source project of our developers here. Now we can all rest easier, knowing our work will be afforded the substantial protection provided by copyright law.