Removal of Content under creative commons I wrote content for 2 years on a website licensed under creative commons license CC-SA-BY 3.0. The community has become increasingly toxic and abusive and I no longer wished to be affiliated with the project. Upon requesting that my content be removed from the site the admin refused claiming that it was community property, before the owner claimed that I didnt write it and that he can do anything he wants with it according to creative commons. Is there legal action I can take to have my content removed from the site? I have drafts to prove that I am in fact the original author.
You can't Under clause 7(b) of the CC-SA-BY 3.0 the licence is irrevocable providing that the licensee complies with its terms. However, ... It appears that your work is part of a Collection (as defined and under clause 4(a), the licensee has this obligation: If You create a Collection, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collection any credit as required by Section 4(c), as requested. While you cannot have your work removed, you can have the attribution removed so that no one knows that it is your work - this would seem to meet your desire of having no association with the website. "To the extent practicable" should include anonymising you. As a bonus, if they don't do this "to the extent practicable" then they are in breach of the licence and it's automatically revoked - you can then proceed with DCMA takedown notices and/or sue for copyright breach.
The code is copyrighted. You are not given any permission to use or copy any part of it, nor to create a derivative work based on it. There is no way for you to "make the copyright null". The code was copyrighted in 2005, and the copyright will not expire until 70 years after the death of the author, under US law. The period would vary in some other countries, but in no country that I know of will it expire in the next few years. That the author is dead, or the publisher out of business, does not change this legally. Someone, probably the author's heir, or perhaps whoever bought the remains of the publisher's business, will own the copyright. However, the ideas and programming techniques shown and discussed in the book are not protected, and you may use them freely to write programs, commercial or non-commercial. You need not even acknowledge the book as a source of ideas, although to do so would be nice. Of course, since the author is dead and the publisher not active, if you were to infringe the copyright by copying code from thsi book, there is a reasonable chance that no one would notice, but if someone did notice, the current owner of the copyright could sue you for infringement, and could perhaps win sizable damages. It would be safer to write your own original code using only the general ideas from the book. In future, do not ever assume that you can just take someone else's code (or other creative work, such as a book) and reuse it without permission, unless it is in the public domain, for example because it was published before 1923.
You are not supposed to "explain" anything. See this site: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-takedown-notice-targeting-your-content What you have to do is to state, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief that your material was wrongly removed. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Google (or whoever the host is) doesn't care and shouldn't care about the actual copyright situation, only whether you supplied a counter notice where you state that your material was wrongly removed. Now Google should reinstate your app (however, since nobody can force them to host your app at all, I suspect they can remove it at any time for any reason), and whoever put in the DMCA claim can then go and sue you for copyright infringement. If they do, you can use as a defence that they could have and should have a DMCA notice to you. The whole DMCA is about your host, here: Google, to remove itself from any copyright infringement case. By following the rules for a proper notice and proper counter notice, they achieve that. And then the matter is between the complainant and you.
It's hard to say, under the Twitter TOS. They do not claim that copyright is transferred to them: &quot;You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your photos and videos are part of the Content)&quot;. But you do license the content: By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services. The totality of conditions, including the Twitter Rules, is ever-evolving and not apparently contained in a single link. From what I can tell, there is no condition that prohibits a user from copying tweets into a book. There are numerous statements about &quot;respecting copyright&quot; which refer to taking material that is not licensed to Twitter and redistributing: nothing about redistributing licensed material.A plain reading of the first bold sentence says that you can make your content available to the world, not restricted to &quot;retweeting&quot;.
Yes, a work with no license is All Rights Reserved, reserved meaning the creator of the work. Who is the creator of the work ? Everyone who contributed it, unanimously. Yes. If people contributed any copyrightable part of your work, in theory you cannot add any license or grant any right to use/reproduce/whatever the work without their unanimous agreement. That's very cumbersome, and almost nobody really does that, but it's what the law is. Big serious companies and repos require contributors to waive their rights on the code they contribute, by agreeing to a contributor's agreement. For example, python/cpython requires you to give your contribs a license allowing the python org to do essentially what they want with it, even though you retain copyright over them. If your project is not so serious, I suggest it should be enough to make the license clear, and that by contributing people are agreeing to place their contribution's code under the license. If it's a free license, that's all you need.
Am I as the user of this site in any way liable if the music turns out to violate copyright? Yes. In a similar way to if I give you “permission” to take my neighbour’s car. Only worse. Because stealing requires intent - you have to mean to do it - while copyright violation is strict liability - if you do it, you’re guilty. If the user that uploaded the item did not have the authority to give the site permission then the site does not have permission and neither do you. If you take reasonable precautions such as performing a reverse image source and verifying that the item appears to be owned by the same person everywhere and, perhaps, reaching out to them then your violation will be an “innocent” infringement which mitigates but does not eliminate damages. The only way to be sure with copyright is to know the provenance of the copyright/licences back to the original creator.
Do you have an explicit permission by the artist? Does the artist give a blanket permission to anyone which covers this kind of use of their work (a license)? If no, then you commit a copyright violation when you use their work for your blog. This applies to practically any country which signed the Berne convention which is almost everywhere in the world. Having no commercial interest is usually not an excuse to violate copyright. Regarding which jurisdiction applies when you, your website and the copyright holder are in different countries: I opened a new question about this.
You can design whatever this system is (leaving aside jurisdictions without First Amendment-like law that lets you design to your hearts content), the problem comes in implementing. The main legal question is whether you are operating a website. A website operator has to comply with various laws that require them to remove content. For example, if you operate a website that allows users to distribute content that they upload, they can distribute copyright-protected content, and you can be held liable for copyright infringement. DMCA in the US provides a way for you to not get sued, but you have to be able to remove putatively infringing content, so you could get sued if you can't remove illegal content. This may also include legal troubles over e.g. defamatory content where a plaintiff gets a court order to remove the content – you can't plead &quot;I can't it down&quot; if the court orders you to do so. Napster was sued for copyright infringement and racketeering for facilitating law-breaking by others (&quot;secondary infringement&quot;), and in MGM v. Grokster the Supreme Court annonced the general principle that One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses Grokster's problems arose because they clearly intended the software to be used to violate copyright law, whereas it is unlikely that Github will get sued because it is possible to use the platform illegally. So it really matters exactly what this &quot;platform&quot; is and what your relationship to the platform is. Describing a system is generally not illegal, realizing and maintaining one can easily be.