Does a company own my company&#39;s product if I use their open source code? Does a company own my company's product if I use their open source code? I am reading through the SDK License agreement of a company's code and it reads: ======================================== 2. Intellectual Property (a) [corp name] SDK and [corp name] Code. All right, title and interest in and to the intellectual property embodied in the [corp name] SDK and [corp name] Code, including any improvements, enhancements or other modifications thereto made by [corp name], is owned by, and shall remain the property of [corp name], including, without limitation, any associated patents, copyrights, trademarks and logos. [corp name] is free to use, implement and incorporate in the [corp name] SDK and [corp name] Code any suggestions, ideas, recommendations or feedback of Licensee, without payment of additional consideration to Licensee. Licensee acknowledges that the [corp name] SDK and [corp name] Code shall remain the sole and exclusive property of [corp name], notwithstanding such use, implementation or incorporation. ======================================== (b) Licensee Products. All right, title and interest in and to the intellectual property embodied in the Licensee Products, including any improvements, enhancements or other modifications thereto made by Licensee, is owned by, and shall remain the property of Licensee, including, without limitation, any associated patents, copyrights, trademarks and logos, subject to [corp name]’s ownership of the [corp name] Code and [corp name] SDK. ======================================== Can they sue me and/or take my profits if I use their code? What if I only look at their product and reverse engineer it? What is the extent of legal power they have in this situation?
You should probably get a lawyer, but my reading is this: The company whose SDK you use owns their SDK, owns their code, and is free to take any of your ideas how to improve their code without paying you. But they say that ideas are ten a penny, so this is mostly there to prevent pointless lawsuits. On the other hand, it says that everything you do with your product is yours. I might be completely wrong, that's why you should get a lawyer.
The requirement to make the code publicly available is binding on Olio, and on Olio's successor, Flex. Olio, by accepting the code under the GPL, had contracted with the original author of that code, one of the contract provisions being to make any modified code available publicly. If Olio fails to abide by that agreement, it is in violation of the license, and the original author could sue Olio for copyright infringement, or sue Flex as having bought the assets and liabilities. But the individual employees of Olio are not under any obligation to publish such modified code, as they were presumably not parties to the license deal -- Olio was. Therefore the NDA does not require them to violate any law or contract to which they might be parties. The NDA could probably not be used to prevent the employees from testifying if called in such a copyright suit. If the NDA did require an illegal action, it would be void. If it merely required a person to violate a civil agreement that could be settled for money, it might or might not be enforceable, depending on the exact provisions, its reasonableness under the exact circumstances, and the local law.
You can license the use of your IP only for certain uses, for example (most commonly) &quot;non-commercial&quot;. The general template of permission is &quot;You have permission to ___ as long as you ___&quot;. What the user is permitted to do, in your scheme, is something along the lines of &quot;only distribute the output in this manner&quot;, or &quot;not distribute code developed with this tool anywhere else&quot;. It's up to you to prove that someone violated that condition, if they did.
It's not clear exactly what you're asking, when you say "the company I work for" – i.e. are you asking "can they fire me?" (almost certainly they can, even if their TOS thinking is legally misguided – unless in your country there are laws that prevent firing employees). To be certain, you need to hire an attorney who is sufficiently savvy about web page technology that they can accurately judge what you are doing, and whether you can fruitfully resist their demands. You seem to be skeptical of their position because you are "not affecting their servers in any way". The TOS is not about affecting their servers, it is about affecting their intellectual property. It appears that your code does a number of the prohibited actions such as and perhaps most importantly "modify". If you have distributed a program that allows users to modify company content on their own computers, then the user might be in violation of the TOS, but not you (since you're not running a server that redistributes). However, I am betting that in order to create and test the program you had to violate the TOS. Additionally, you could be vicariously liable for the infringements of others, especially if this program can only be used to infringe on copyright, and you know this fact. That is pretty much the end of the legal part. As for how you should respond, your attorney, and not Law SE, deals in recommendations.
If the code is unrelated to your employment you own the copyright no matter if it is written in Visual Studio, on a piece of paper or tattooed on your butt. In the same way a sculptor owns the copyright in their sculpture even if they use someone else's chisel. Using Visual Studio in this way may, however, violated your contract with your employer and/or their contract with Microsoft. Why go there? Visual Studio Community is free.
If I make a working prototype and upload it on youtube will it prevent others from getting a patent on the idea? Generally yes. If the core information is accessible to the public, it becomes &quot;prior art&quot; and cannot be patented anymore by someone else. That includes you. Depending on local legislation, you have a small time window to apply for a patent (after disclosure) but if you don't, it's public domain and everybody is free to use it. If it's mainly code, you may be able to upload to Github and attach a license to it but that offers only limited protection. Globally? That depends on local legislation which there are too many of, to answer this here.
Based on the contract language quoted in the question, and the facts stated there, it would seem that the employee owns the copyright on the software. It would seem that the software was not created &quot;during the course of employment.&quot; However, when the employee offers it to the employer free of charge, the employer may well want to own the copyright and any other related IP. The employer might want the employee to sign an agreement transferring the copyright. Or the employer might simply treat the software as belonging to the employer. Asserting and enforcing the copyright against the employer might be difficult. Insisting on even a token payment would help establish thst the copyright belongs to the employee, or gettign the employer to sign an acknowledgement of the ewmployee's copyright would have a similar, bnt even stronger effect.
It depends on what information you are sharing, how you got it, and what rights the business asserts over the information. For example, if it is content created by the business and they claim copyright protection you can only use it without their permission in accordance with Fair use exceptions. If you obtain the information through some limited/conditional access agreement you would be subject to the terms of that agreement. As always: If you want a legal opinion specific to your use case you need to consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction.