Mark Radcliffe

313 points
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Silicon Valley

Mark Radcliffe is a senior partner who practices corporate securities and intellectual property at DLA Piper. DLA Piper is a global law firm with over 4000 lawyers in more than 40 countries and 65 cities. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry magna cum laude from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Mr. Radcliffe’s practice focuses on representing corporations in their intellectual property and finance matters. He has worked with many open source companies and is Chair of the Open Source Practice Group at the firm. He assisted Sun Microsystems in open sourcing the Solaris operating system and drafting the CDDL. And he represents other large companies in their open source matters including eBay, Accenture, Adobe, Palm and Sony. He represents many open source startups including SugarCRM (the first venture backed open source applications company), DotNetNuke and Cleversafe as their general outside counsel (including both their financing and intellectual property matters), and represents Zimbra, DeviceVM, Revolution Computing, Compiere, Funambol and Reductive Labs for intellectual property matters, He represented Siemens Venture Capital in their investment in MontaVista Software, Inc and Hummer Winblad and Morganthaler in their investment in MuleSource. He also serves as outside General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative and was the Chair of Committee C for the Free Software Foundation in reviewing GPLv3.
He has spoken on open source issues at the Open Source Business Conference, Silicon Valley Association of General Counsel, American Corporate Counsel Association and O’Reilly Open Source Conference. In 1997, the National Law Journal named him one of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in the United States. . He has been listed in the “The Best Lawyers in America,” beginning with the 2005 edition, as one of Northern California’s Top 100 intellectual property attorneys in “Super Lawyers,” San Francisco Magazine as one of “America’s Leading Lawyers for Business” and Who’s Who Legal publication, “The International Who’ Who of Business Lawyers”. In 1998, Harvard Law School designated him a “Distinguished Alumni”. He has been quoted on intellectual property matters in Time Magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Examiner, San Jose Mercury News and the Daily Variety. Mr. Radcliffe has published articles in such legal magazines as the National Law Journal, Trademark World, Computer Lawyer, California Law Business and Copyright World. He participates in a series of webinars on open source legal issues with Black Duck http://www.blackducksoftware.com/files/legal-webinar-series.html.

Authored Content

Top 10 FOSS issues of 2012

The year 2012 had many important FOSS legal developments which reflects the continued increase in FOSS use. FOSS projects have increased from 600,000 in 2010 to 900,000 by…