&quot;Or otherwise&quot; in Copyright Agreement I have an agreement presented by an employer that has the following bullet point: Employees are prohibited from using, exploiting, disseminating, or reproducing any intellectual work, in any form or of any nature that belongs to [removed], whether or not it is covered by copyright, for personal profit or otherwise. What use is prohibited exactly? Does the &quot;personal profit or otherwise&quot; mean &quot;personal or non-personal profit&quot;, &quot;personal profit or personal non-profit&quot;, or &quot;any reason&quot;?
Does the &quot;personal profit or otherwise&quot; mean &quot;personal or non-personal profit&quot;, &quot;personal profit or personal non-profit&quot;, or &quot;any reason&quot;? This means personal profit, or any other use not authorized by the employer.
You are creating a derivative work. You are only allowed to do this if the library comes with a license that allows this. If you want to give your derivative work to anyone else, copying it is copyright infringement unless the license allows it. Copying the derivative work and attaching a different license is most likely to be copyright infringement. And if people receive a copy with an open source license that is not justified and rely on it, that’s creating one unholy legal mess for everyone involved and can be massively more expensive than plain copyright infringement. No license means you don’t have permission to do anything with it, not creating derivative work, not distributing it, and certainly not publish it with an open source license.
Another term sometimes used in place of &quot;copyright troll&quot; or &quot;patent troll&quot; in order to be less pejorative is &quot;non-practising entity&quot;1 (moreso in the patent context). These terms refer to a family of characteristics, not always present in every particular instance. These are not well-defined legal concepts but are used colloquially (mostly in academia and journalism) to describe a kind of behaviour in the legal system. Some legal opinions have used the term &quot;troll&quot;.2 And some statutes even aim to assist defendants subject to claims from trolls.3 Some features: they do not licence or produce the material themself they adopt aggressive, vexatious, and frivolous litigation tactics to attempt to get high value settlements they initiate claims or demands beyond the scope of their rights or despite fair use defences litigation awards and settlements are a significant part of their revenue Because these terms (copyright troll, patent troll, troll, non-practising entity) do not have a precise meaning, good academic work that uses such a term will provide a definition of how they are using the term within their work.4 1. This is also somewhat imprecise, but by non-practising entity, this refers to entities that do not &quot;practise the patent.&quot; This is an odd phrase, but to practise a patent means to actually use, make, or sell the patented invention or products incorporating the patented invention (as opposed to merely excluding others from doing so). 2. I haven't done my own independent research for this and am not providing a list of cases, but see footnote 17 of Brad Greenberg, &quot;Copyright Trolls and Presumptively Fair Uses&quot;, 2014. It lists a few judicial opinions from the United States using the term, often in quotation marks. The opinions relate trollness to &quot;costly and expansive discovery to need to oppose a fair use defence&quot;, that one party was not a troll because it &quot;actually produced the [works] and did not merely acquire the copyright therein to enforce against infringers&quot;, that &quot;copyright trolling&quot; uses litigation &quot;not to make the copyright owner whole but to provide a new revenue stream&quot;. There are likely many more examples. 3. See for example Washington State's Patent Troll Prevention Act. They use the term only in the short title because of its popular connotation. The term does not appear in the text of the statute. Instead, it prohibits what is considered &quot;bad faith&quot; assertions of patent infringement and includes a description in a preamble of what the legislature considers the nuisance to be. 4. Greenberg's operational definition is: &quot;a copyright owner who: (1) acquires a copyright—either through purchase or act of authorship—for the primary purpose of pursuing past, present, or future infringement actions; (2) compensates authors or creates works with an eye to the litigation value of a work, not the commercial value; (3) lacks a good faith licensing program; and (4) uses the prospect of statutory damages and litigation expenses to extract quick settlements of often weak claims.&quot;
Such use might well be illegal, and subject the user to tort liability, or possibly even criminal liability. Parties For this discussion let us call the person or company that developed and wants to protect the information D, the person or company that downloaded and wants to use the information U, and the person who placed the information on the server P. Trade Secret One possible source of liability is if D considers the information to be a trade-secret. The law on trade secrets varies to some extent in different countries, although there is a general similarity. Since no jurisdiction is specified in the question, I am going to look at the united-states law. Definition The LII page on &quot;Trade Secrets defines a trade secret under the US Uniform Trade Secrets Act (&quot;UTSA&quot;) as: &quot;information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process that: Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable by proper means by, other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy. A similar definition is given by the USPTO page on &quot;trade secret policy&quot;. Prior to the USTA, and still in those US states that have not adopted the USTA, trade secrets were/are protected under the common law. The LII page lists the common law factors, as given by the Restatement of Torts (1939) § 757, comment b: The extent to which the information is known outside the claimant's business The extent to which it is known by employees and others involved in the business The extent of measures taken by the claimant to guard the secrecy of the information The value of the information to the business and its competitors The amount of effort or money expended by the business in developing the information The ease or difficulty with which the information could be properly acquired or duplicated by others These factors may apply in other common-law countries. In either case, one must consider how the would-be user came to acquire the information, and thus how it came to be on the server from which it was downloaded. One must also consider whether it was the subject of &quot;reasonable efforts&quot; to protect its secrecy, under the circumstances. Circumstances If P was violating an obligation of confidentiality, such as an NDA or a duty as part of an employment relationship, then the placement of the info on the server was improper. In such a case its acquisition by another, such as U might constitute misappropriation. The same would be true if a person under an obligation of confidentiality arranged for the server to be indexed by a search engine, when it should not have been. The case for misappropriation would be stronger if U knew that the information was considered confidential by D, and also if P had informed U about where to find the info, or what search terms would uncover it. If P was acting with the permission of D, and P or someone else at D simply failed to realize that the server was, or might become, indexed, then the question is whether the steps taken by D to keep the info secret were reasonable. If this a case of &quot;inadvertent disclosure resulting from the trade secret holder's failure to take reasonable protective measures&quot; then there is no misappropriation, and the actions of U are lawful. That will depend of a judgement of whether D's actions were reasonable in light of the value of the info and the overall circumstances. If the placement of the info on the server is considered to constitute &quot;general publication&quot; of the info, so that it is no longer secret in any meaningful sense, then D may have a claim against P, but not against U unless U acted in collaboration with P. Copyright Law The documents downloaded from the4 server are almost surely protected by copyright. Directly incorporating them into an open source project without permission from the copyright holder would be copyright infringement, and would subject U to a suit for infringement. However, copyright does not protect ideas, methods, or facts. If U learns a method or idea from the document, and uses that knowledge without directly copying or closely paraphrasing the document, there is no copyright infringement and no claim under copyright law. Patent Law The question does not mention any patents. It is possible that D has patented the method describe in the downloaded documents. If so, and if the patent is valid, any use by U would be patent infringement, and the question of how U learned the info becomes irrelevant. However, most software developments such as data structures are not patented, so this is a somewhat unlikely, albeit possible, case. Notre that if the information is covered by a patent is is by definition not secret, as all patents must be openly disclosed. But they may not be widely publicized, and if U does not make a patent search, U may not realize that the document includes patented technology. This possibility is largely incompatible with the trade secret possibility, althogh it is possible to use trade secrets in connection with patented tech. Conclusion In short whether U may lawfully use then info, or is subject to a tort claim by D, or even criminal action, depend on the details of the overall facts. U would do well to take legal advice on the matter before proceeding to use the info.
I assume you are talking about United States federal copyright law. You can freely use any: material published before 1923 material published between 1923 and 1963 for which the copyright was not renewed material explicitly placed in the public domain material not copyrightable (such as any US government publication) material whose copyright has been abandoned (for example the author died with no heir)
Copyright never protects ideas or processes, it only protects expression: words, images, and sounds, some of which may describe ideas. But when a work is nothing more than a translation of an idea into words, with no independent originality -- when almost anyone would use more or less the same way to describe the idea, then the work will not be protected by copyright at all, as it is not considered an "original work". Computer code that implements an algorithm often falls under this rule. It is my belief that the code shown in the linked SE thread would fall under this rule, and would not be protected by copyright at all. If this is correct, then anyone may share such a program with no copyright concern.
My remarks pertain only to US Law. Laws vary in other countries. Subject matter eligible for copyright protection in the US must be expressive and creative. To the extent data are merely measurements of observable fact in the world, they are not copyrightable. It may be that the presentation or interpretation of data is eligible for copyright protection (for example, artwork used in charts, graphs, graphics, etc., that is expressive and creative), subject to various equitable use provisions (in particular Fair Use, which is still a legal grey area). The methods by which data are gathered can be considered IP, but is the domain of patents. Methods are not copyrightable (17 USC 102(b)).
Non-commercial copying of a copyrighted work is still copyright infringement. Realistically, a copyright or trademark infringement lawsuit is unlikely, uneconomical, and bad press, but ultimately, the owner of a copyrighted work has a right to control how it is used.