Distribute Sysinternals free console program with my shareware application? I am a shareware author (more on the hobbyist level) and I would like to distribute the free SysInternals program Sigcheck (a small console program) as a helper tool together with my program. Sigcheck would not perform the main part of my program's functionality, rather a secondary functionality, by fetching the console output of Sigcheck (for checking the security information of Windows/Microsoft programs). Would it be enough to put the EULA of SigCheck inside the installed program directory where the SigCheck program file is located?
From the Sysinternals Licensing FAQ: Q: May I distribute Sysinternals utilities in my software, on my website, or with my magazine? A: No. We are not offering any distribution licenses, even if the 3rd party is distributing them for free. We encourage people to download the utilities from our download center where they can be assured to get the most recent version of the utility.
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.
We can't really know until the ruling is made. The Supreme Court might issue a ruling that encompasses all software APIs, or may predicate its ruling on this more specific situation, e.g. that because Oracle's library is so extensive its structure can be copyrighted even if that does not necessarily mean that any individual function signature can be copyrighted. They could also decide based on something unrelated to the heart of the copyright question - skimming through the petition for a writ of certiorari, they could make a decision based on the original implied license from Sun, for example. Hopefully their decision will answer the copyright question of function declarations completely, but it isn't required to.
You cannot run MacOS legally on any computer that is not Apple-branded. It is a DMCA violation. There are technical measures in place that check that the OS is running on an Apple branded computer. These measures are easily circumvented, but they need to be circumvented, which makes it a DMCA violation. A company selling computers with MacOS installed (Psystar) was ordered to pay $2,500 per computer for the DMCA violation (they never paid Apple, they didn't even have money to pay their lawyers). In practice, Apple will ignore you as long as you don't make claims that what you do is legal. Buying a Mac with legally owned version of MacOS and not using is makes absolutely no difference. And it would never be fair use. It is either copyright infringement or it is not, bue it is never fair use. "Fair use" is not about "being fair". It is about a very specific set of excuses that you can have why your copyright infringement shouldn't be punished. You are not using MacOS for parody, or just tiny extracts. For example, if you copied ten lines of source code from MacOS, Linux and Windows to demonstrate in a computer science course how different operating systems handle the same task in different ways, that would quite likely be "fair use".
The starting point is whether you infringe copyright by downloading or using the cracked software. The licence you purchase relates to a specific copy of the software. The licence almost certainly does not say 'You can use any copy of this software.' It will usually say something like 'You may install this software', surrounded by other language that makes it clear that 'software' refers to a specific copy. E.g. the Windows 7 EULA says 'you may install one copy of the software on one computer' and, in another place, says 'By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, return it to the retailer for a refund or credit.' Nothing in that licence allows you to download an infringing copy of Windows from elsewhere and apply your licence to that copy. In the case of Windows, you don't have a licence to run 'Windows', you have a licence to run a specific copy of Windows. Therefore, even though you have purchased a licence, you would not have a licence for the cracked copy. Running a computer program inherently requires you to make copies of it in memory. In the absence of a copyright licence, this is copyright infringement: MAI Systems Corp v. Peak Computer Inc (1993) 991 F.2d 511 (defendant, who was not a licensee in relation to software, ran software and in doing so created copies of the software in memory; the person was purportedly authorised by a licensee to do so, but the licensee did not have the right to so authorise the defendant). In some jurisdictions, there is legislation to permit non-licensees to run software without infringing copyright, but these provisions (at least the ones in the US and Australia) don't apply to copies of the program which are themselves infringing copies. See 17 USC 117(a) and section 47B of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Now, supposing you do infringe copyright, the question of whether that is a criminal act will depend on the jurisdiction and the other facts of the case. In Australia, downloading or using software is almost never a criminal act (offences under the Copyright Act require trade in infringing copies or commercial scale, etc). In the US, infringing copyright for commercial gain (e.g. if the software is for use in a business) or of particularly expensive software might be criminal under the No Electronic Theft Act. Furthermore, downloading the 'cracked' software may make one complicit in the distributor's offending, specifically by way of 'counselling and procuring' or 'conspiracy'. The distributor's offending may include the kind of commercial copyright infringement that is criminalised.
You could establish your own server which calls the API and maintains a counter, and have al your applications call that server, the server call the API, and the server can also return a count to the application, or even return a failure code if the count is too high. As for when the count turns over, a few days experiment should establish that, but given that the API is based in the EU, I would guess it turns over at midnight UTC (aka Greenwich mean time), but of course that is only a guess. Has the API management declined even to tell when the count rolls over? That seems odd. As to the legal obligations of the API management, it would be good practice for them to have the API return a count, but I don't see that they can be required to do that. I don't know of (and could not find) any law which mandates such a count. I do think that they should inform you of the time of day at which they roll the count over. I have not yet found a law which specifically requires this.
Germany may be different, however in the United States this would be considered work-for-hire and the employer would be the rightful owner of the source code. Regardless of jurisdiction, and from a more practical point of view, you are better off not having a copy of the source code. Using it as reference or example in the future could easily turn into (unintentional) copyright infringement. If, in the future, you write code you would like to be able to freely keep and reuse in any project, make sure the owner/employer licenses it using something like the BSD, MIT, or ISC license.
Can anybody create their own license? That is to say, can I for example create my own license under which I can license software? Yep. It's just a contract granting rights to use a copyrighted work. You can write your own contracts, so you can write your own software license. It's just often recommended that you don't, because common licenses are more well-understood, and inexperienced drafters may make errors that could result in problems, such as unintended restrictions, failing to restrict things that were intended to be restricted, or creating provisions that aren't enforceable in some/all jurisdictions. Can you mandate how a software will be released? Yes. Many software licenses, including GPL, do. The restrictions you describe in your example sound similar to CC BY-NC-SA. Also, would the following clause even be legal? Using this software you agree that any work and intellectual property based on or created with this software will be under the [INSERT_NAME_LICENSE] license, even after any and all code from this software is removed in a future update, or even if the work is rebuilt from the ground up I'm not entirely certain, but &quot;even after any and all code from this software is removed in a future update, or even if the work is rebuilt from the ground up&quot; seems, in my opinion, unlikely to be enforceable—especially &quot;even if the work is rebuilt from the ground up.&quot; How would you differentiate a complete rebuild from a totally new piece of software? More broadly, once your copyrighted code is no longer in the product, there's nothing for them to license from you. It's hard to imagine how you'd be able to claim that you're harmed by someone releasing a new version of a product that used to contain your code under a different license. Without harm to you, there's nothing for a court to redress.