Bio

Andrew Katz has over 25 years’ experience as a technology lawyer. He joined Moorcrofts in March 2000, shortly after the firm was founded. He is one of the UK’s leading free and open-source lawyers, is a Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Open Forum Academy, and for 7 years held the post of visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, on Free and Open-Source Software. He has lectured on open issues globally at venues, including London, Paris, New York, Boston, Tokyo, Seoul, Helsinki, Stockholm, Dubai, Mangalia (Romania), Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Yokohama, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge. He is also a visiting researcher at the University of Skövde, Sweden where he has co-authored papers whose findings have been adopted into Swedish government policy. Andrew drafted the widely-used solderpad Open Hardware Licence and is on the core legal team for drafting the CERN Open Hardware licence. Clients have included some of the world’s leading free and open-source software companies and projects, including Canonical (Ubuntu) and CentOS (where he negotiated the business transfer to Red Hat). He handles cloud computing and project agreements, including complex data protection issues, and has recently been involved in the rapidly expanding fields of open data and open hardware. As well as speaking on legal issues at the 2012 Open Hardware Summit in New York, he co-chaired the 2014 Open Hardware and Data Conference in Barcelona (the world’s first legal conference specialising in open hardware and data), when he has spoken regularly since. A highlight of his frequent international speaking engagements was providing the keynote speech at OpenSym 2019 in Sweden. Andrew’s skillsets cover free and open source software licensing, technology law, commercial law and intellectual property. He qualified as a barrister and was called to the bar (Inner Temple) in 1991, and has now re-qualified as practises as a solicitor in England and Wales. He is also an Irish solicitor (non-practising).