Symantec 2009 Annual Report Download - page 79

Third parties claiming that we infringe their proprietary rights could cause us to incur significant legal
expenses and prevent us from selling our products.
From time to time, we receive claims that we have infringed the intellectual property rights of others, including
claims regarding patents, copyrights, and trademarks. In addition, former employers of our former, current, or
future employees may assert claims that such employees have improperly disclosed to us the confidential or
proprietary information of these former employers. Any such claim, with or without merit, could result in costly
litigation and distract management from day-to-day operations. If we are not successful in defending such claims,
we could be required to stop selling, delay shipments of, or redesign our products, pay monetary amounts as
damages, enter into royalty or licensing arrangements, or satisfy indemnification obligations that we have with
some of our customers. We cannot assure you that any royalty or licensing arrangements that we may seek in such
circumstances will be available to us on commercially reasonable terms or at all.
In addition, we license and use software from third parties in our business. These third party software licenses
may not continue to be available to us on acceptable terms or at all, and may expose us to additional liability. This
liability, or our inability to use any of this third party software, could result in shipment delays or other disruptions in
our business that could materially and adversely affect our operating results.
If we do not protect our proprietary information and prevent third parties from making unauthorized use
of our products and technology, our financial results could be harmed.
Most of our software and underlying technology is proprietary. We seek to protect our proprietary rights
through a combination of confidentiality agreements and procedures and through copyright, patent, trademark, and
trade secret laws. However, all of these measures afford only limited protection and may be challenged, invalidated,
or circumvented by third parties. Third parties may copy all or portions of our products or otherwise obtain, use,
distribute, and sell our proprietary information without authorization. Third parties may also develop similar or
superior technology independently by designing around our patents. Our shrink-wrap license agreements are not
signed by licensees and therefore may be unenforceable under the laws of some jurisdictions. Furthermore, the laws
of some foreign countries do not offer the same level of protection of our proprietary rights as the laws of the U.S.,
and we may be subject to unauthorized use of our products in those countries. The unauthorized copying or use of
our products or proprietary information could result in reduced sales of our products. Any legal action to protect
proprietary information that we may bring or be engaged in with a strategic partner or vendor could adversely affect
our ability to access software, operating system, and hardware platforms of such partner or vendor, or cause such
partner or vendor to choose not to offer our products to their customers. In addition, any legal action to protect
proprietary information that we may bring or be engaged in, alone or through our alliances with the Business
Software Alliance (“BSA”), or the Software & Information Industry Association (“SIIA”), could be costly, may
distract management from day-to-day operations, and may lead to additional claims against us, which could
adversely affect our operating results.
Some of our products contain “open source” software, and any failure to comply with the terms of one or
more of these open source licenses could negatively affect our business.
Certain of our products are distributed with software licensed by its authors or other third parties under so-
called “open source” licenses, which may include, by way of example, the GNU General Public License (“GPL”),
GNU Lesser General Public License (“LGPL”), the Mozilla Public License, the BSD License, and the Apache
License. Some of these licenses contain requirements that we make available source code for modifications or
derivative works we create based upon the open source software, and that we license such modifications or
derivative works under the terms of a particular open source license or other license granting third parties certain
rights of further use. If we combine our proprietary software with open source software in a certain manner, we
could, under certain of the open source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software.
In addition to risks related to license requirements, usage of open source software can lead to greater risks than use
of third party commercial software, as open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or controls on
origin of the software. We have established processes to help alleviate these risks, including a review process for
screening requests from our development organizations for the use of open source, but we cannot be sure that all
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