About the Author

David Rudin is an Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft, where he has spent over twenty years focused on intellectual property, standards, and open source. He led Microsoft's Open Source and Standards Legal Team, working in close partnership with the company's Open Source Program Office to help Microsoft engage in open source at scale.

David has built several of the legal tools discussed in this book. He founded the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), pioneering the use of Series LLC structures to create a "consortium-in-a-box" that lets new standards organizations launch in days rather than months. JDF now hosts over thirty projects — including the Alliance for Open Media, Overture Maps, and C2PA — and is part of the Linux Foundation. He led the development of the Open Web Foundation agreements, which brought the low friction of open source-style licensing to standards development. And he created the Community Specification License (CSL), designed to bring standards development best practices into the Git-based workflows developers use daily.

As legal chair for the Alliance for Open Media, David built the legal infrastructure supporting the AV1 video compression standard, working with attorneys from across the technology ecosystem. AV1 now powers video across hundreds of millions of devices for platforms including Netflix, YouTube, and Teams. This work was recognized by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award.

He holds a JD and a Master of Science in Management Information Systems from Boston University and a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives in Redmond, Washington.