Imagine a world where the most brilliant ideas—your designs, your code, your stories—are instantly repurposed and profited from by faceless algorithms and global tech giants. That world isn’t science fiction, it’s already here.
As AI automates creative processes across industries, protecting the fruits of human intellect has never been more critical. The global intellectual property (IP) industry is a significant economic force. According to Statista, intellectual property-intensive industries directly contribute to 45 percent of the European Union (EU)’s GDP. A further 90 percent of European Union (EU) exports consist of products manufactured in IPR-intensive industries. So, its protection is far from just a tangential concern.
ZOOOM, an EU-funded project, launched in 2022 to help businesses understand how to manage intellectual property (IP)—including copyrights, patents and trademarks—when working in open and collaborative environments. The concern is that such environments, while created with fairness in mind, can, and often do present IP risks.
For instance, anyone can use and modify Open Source Software (OSS). Open Data (OD) is shared information that can be accessed and reused by others. Meanwhile, Open Hardware (OH) refers to physical technology designs that are openly shared. Together, OSS, OD and OH, referred to as the three “Os” (3Os), represent an increasingly robust but complex ecosystem that often pits innovation against potential intellectual property challenges.
What are the benefits of open source for society?
Software has become an essential, near-invisible backbone of modern life. As digitalisation accelerates, software is now a key societal resource—but one that’s often artificially limited by proprietary licenses. In contrast, free and open source software ensures long-term availability by allowing anyone to use, adapt and redistribute code. This not only preserves knowledge for future generations but also supports a broader, more resilient digital ecosystem.
At the same time, the environmental impact of our increasingly digital world is growing. The Internet’s energy consumption rivals the aviation industry’s, and software inefficiency plays a direct role in this footprint. While software itself is immaterial, coding and running it consumes electricity—often with a high carbon cost. Promoting ecologically efficient, freely available software is a crucial step toward digital sustainability, ensuring both access and reduced impact for generations to come.
Read more: Sustainable Software: How Free Licences Help Conserve Resources
Fair, accessible and human-centered
When the ZOOOM Initiative launched, it was stepping into an increasingly contested digital landscape. Advocates of transparency and collaboration in the digital sphere have long championed the push for 3Os. Yet, despite decades of progress, proprietary models, those which are developed, owned and controlled by a specific company still dominate. And, concerns continue to challenge the open movement.
How did ZOOOM work & who was it for?
Over the course of two years, ZOOOM conducted extensive research to understand how (commercial) open source supports business opportunity. They developed training materials and organised awareness campaigns to make open ecosystems more accessible to businesses, academia and policymakers. Now, as ZOOOM makes its findings publicly available, the big question is: in an age where Big Tech exerts more influence than ever, can open, collaborative principles really succeed?
We spoke to Ivo Emanuilov, an IP Lawyer, Affiliated Researcher at KU Leuven’s Centre for IT & IP Law and one of the masterminds behind ZOOOM. Backed by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and a network of partners, ZOOOM set out to tackle these obstacles and prove the purpose of 3Os head-on.
“The project idea was born out of a workshop on intellectual property issues of collaborative manufacturing. We wanted to figure out why companies choose to use open source components or release their products under open source licences. How can businesses in patent-intensive industries still use and benefit from open source?”
The magic rule of intellectual property protection
Emanuilov thinks so. The outcomes of ZOOOM helped to create a handy metric for the ideal role of open source in any company’s intellectual property strategy.
“Perhaps the best way to describe [it] is the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of any company’s intellectual property is of the supporting variety, that is, it supports the running of the business but is not what differentiates the business from its competitors. In contrast, the remaining 20 percent is intellectual property that usually differentiates a company from its competitors.
We argue that companies should adopt open innovation and open source approaches to those 80 percent, e.g., by nurturing and supporting communities, and only seek ‘true’ intellectual property protection (e.g., in the form of patents) for those 20 percent.”
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As Emanuilov points out, years of dedicated community work have paid off. Open source compliance is now widely acknowledged as essential.
“We now have an internationally recognised standard for open source supply chain compliance management, OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230. The growing adoption of this standard by big companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Arm and many others is evidence that businesses today are serious about their open source compliance programmes.”
With open source compliance gaining serious traction and companies learning how to strategically balance openness with protection, the groundwork for a more open technological future seems promising.
What are the biggest barriers for open technology?
But that’s only part of the picture. While Open Source Software (OSS) has made major strides, ZOOOM’s findings suggest that the broader open technology ecosystem—especially Open Data and Open Hardware—lags behind.
So what’s getting in the way?
The legal maze
Open Source Software has benefited from decades of community-driven innovation and a relatively well-understood legal framework. International copyright agreements like the Berne Convention, which harmonises copyright globally, have helped harmonise practices. But when it comes to data and hardware, things get murkier. There’s no global agreement that standardises rights for databases or hardware designs.
“For example, hardware may be covered by copyright, design rights, database rights, patents, trade secrets and whatnot.” Without a shared understanding of what’s protected and how, creating open licenses that are legally sound—and globally enforceable—is a challenge.
The business dilemma
Many companies want to contribute to open ecosystems in theory. But they’re also under pressure to stay profitable. A concern shared by many businesses that fall into this category is how to contribute to open source without feeling exploited by big tech companies, who may use their open-source tools to power their own platforms without meaningfully giving back. This tension has led some firms to consider relicensing their projects—sometimes even moving from open to proprietary licenses.
But that’s a controversial move, often met with resistance from the open source community. Emanuilov hopes that follow-up initiatives will continue ZOOOM’s work to help companies align their business model with an appropriate IP strategy.
“Project relicensing, especially when the direction is from permissive to proprietary, is not something that open source communities take lightly. And neither should companies“, says Emanuilov.
The regulatory rigmarole
When open-source licensing was born, software development was still largely unregulated. The main legal debate was whether software was protected by copyright or patents. As a result, organisations like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative were able to focus their attention on licensing matters, including compatibility and compliance.
“These times are long gone. The practice of software development is now subject to increasing regulatory pressure. Should we shift our attention from traditional copyright licensing to, more broadly, legal terms that favour openness and freedom? This is a very difficult question.”
But one thing is clear. If we want open technologies to thrive, we need legal, economic and political systems that evolve alongside them.
Open technology has won the ‘war’
So, in an age where Big Tech exerts more influence than ever, can open technology realistically compete? According to Emanuilov, it’s “less about free and open source software competing with big tech and more about the future we want for open source. Big tech companies, like Microsoft, are perhaps the biggest open source champions.” Few people know that in 2018 Microsoft made Project Mu, the UEFI core used in Surface devices and the latest Hyper-V versions, open source.
“This shows the dramatic shifts that have taken place at big tech companies with the broad adoption of open source as the dominant approach for developing software. So, in a way, we could say that free and open source software has won the ‘war’.”
That’s now. But what should the future of open source look like? It seems that AI is the new battlefield. According to Meta, “existing open-source definitions for software do not encompass the complexities of today’s rapidly advancing AI models.” ZOOOM is proud to have contributed to the Open Source AI definition.
However, Emanuilov is “afraid that this is just the beginning of a new battle for keeping fundamental technology open and interoperable. And it has to be fought by both benevolent big tech corporations, which support true open source innovation, and individual developers working side by side with companies.”
