unregulated or illegal Today at work I have some arguments with a colleague. He is stating that unregulated technologies are illegal. Not sure if it makes a difference but the technology we were talking about is cryptocurrency. Is there any principle in law that says that unregulated inventions/technologies are illegal?
In the United States, no. For something to be illegal in any meaningful way, you have to be able to point to a law that makes it illegal. If there's no law to break, it's not illegal. I would wonder if your colleague was thinking about question of whether cryptocurrencies are legal tender. For something to be "legal tender," there would need to be some kind of law or regulation requiring people to accept them as payment. There is no such requirement in the United States, so Bitcoin, for instance, is not legal tender. But that doesn't make it illegal tender; it just means that people can decide whether to accept it or not.
No, it is not illegal. The company has no standing to punish you for that. Companies can't sue random people for sending random email... that was largely settled under the (YOU)-CAN-SPAM Act, when in the guise of standardizing US anti-spam laws, spam was largely legalized and state laws were pre-empted and barred from existing. However, all the other laws still apply Laws on harassment, for instance. Sometimes people with mental illness think another human &quot;owes them&quot; a relationship (which kind of misses the point of what a relationship is, but never mind that). And those people, who sadly are an all-too-common cliché, tend to act badly in very predictable ways. As such, we have plenty of laws on the books (and plenty of family court judges who have seen it all) to dispense consequences to the misbehavior and protection to the victim. All those laws really don't care in which medium one might violate them: sky-writing, naval light signal, email, whatever.
It's hard to give a definitive answer, since the specific details matter. You should read this question and answer, What is a derivate work? for more information. If you're really considering investing the time and energy to create such a product, you might consider getting advice from an actual attorney, and not from strangers on the Internet.
You may, though you may have to be careful about that you say. Providing information about alternative medicine is legal in the US. You can read this article which addresses unapproved medications and therapies from a medical policy perspective, touching lightly on legislation. There are restrictions, enforced by the FDA and the FTC, on what you can sell and claim for your products, in case you sell dietary supplements or are in some other way making a business of purportedly curing people. Here is a starter page about FTC regulation of health claims. Here, for example, are some actions that the FTC took against companies for unproven CBD claims, such as an action against Bionatrol, with many kinds of purportedly false claims made &quot;In connection with the advertising, promotion, offering for sale, sale, or distribution of CBD Products&quot;. It's not the claims that are illegal, it's making the claims in commerce that's illegal. The FDA regulates drugs and devices, and this page divides the FDA regulations into functional types such as &quot;drugs&quot; and &quot;medical devices&quot;. It would be illegal to sell a &quot;brain ray machine&quot; that purports to cure cancer, but it would not be illegal to describe how to build one. There are a number of DIY treatments available on the internet, for removing ticks, slivers, for bandaging scrapes and so on, none of which have or require government approval (in the US). In some cases, such a website might infringe copyright or a patent, so that would be a way in which the website could be illegal (Four Thieves Vinegar). Without any further information on what such a website is saying, it's hard to be sure but this gives you the general limits on the legality of such a site.
The part about "If I'm the owner of the content, surely I have the right to request its deletion" is the problem. Sure, you have the right to request, but you can't legally compel. You have an agreement with them, according to which you got something, and they got something. You can't then take back the thing that you gave them, which is permission to use. You didn't give them the IP itself, which you still hold. Here's an analogy. You may own a car, and can give a person permission to use the car (let's say "if you bring me back a pound of cheese from the store"). You cannot later change your mind (especially after you've gotten the cheese) a say that you retract that permission and therefore they actually stole your car. When permission to use is given, as long as the conditions for granting permission are satisfied, you can't un-give permission.
Copyright and patents are two very very different things. Copyrighting a standard means the wording of the standard can not be copied without the copyright holders permission. It does not protect the ideas expressed in the document, just the way those ideas are expressed. IEEE standards, for example, are copyrighted by the IEEE and therefore you can't make a copy of the Ethernet specification, you need to buy it from them. That has nothing to do with implementing an Ethernet device. To implement something described in a technical specification might or might not require one or more patent licenses. The authors of the standard may not even be aware that something they require for the standard has already been invented and patented by someone else. Many standard bodies do impose a requirement on participants in the standard's creation that they offer licenses to any patents they own that are needed to implement the standard on a fair and equal basis to all. It is called FRAND - the acronym for fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing.
It's possible that CAD has a separate licence from the authors of ABC that allows them to produce a closed source copy. If not, they have no right to distribute CAD. However two wrongs don't make a right, and so you don't get to violate the copyright of CAD.* Unfortunately, unless you are one of the authors of ABC, you have no standing to sue the authors of CAD. You can only notify the authors of ABC and hope they do. If the authors of ABC don't have the resources to pursue the matter, you may be out of luck. That's one of the reasons the FSF gets copyright assignments for their projects. * It turns out that this is a much more debateable issue than I first thought. Some courts have held that an unauthorized derivative work is not copyrightable.
You haven't specified a jurisdiction. In the United Kingdom† this is a clear violation of section 3 of The Computer Misuse Act 1990 (1) A person is guilty of an offence if— &nbsp; &nbsp; (a) he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer; &nbsp; &nbsp; (b) at the time when he does the act he knows that it is unauthorised; and &nbsp; &nbsp; (c) either subsection (2) or subsection (3) below applies. (2) This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act— &nbsp; &nbsp; (a) to impair the operation of any computer; &nbsp; &nbsp; (b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer; [F2or] &nbsp; &nbsp; (c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data; [F3or &nbsp; &nbsp; (d) to enable any of the things mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (c) above to be done.]] Deleting the data is unauthorized (3.1.a) The ethical hacker knows it is unauthorized (3.1.b) Deleting the data prevents access to the data (3.2.b and hence 3.1.c) † This is one of the few Acts that apply to the whole of the UK.