Can I use code from a computergame that is owned by a company A in order to develop my own game at company B? I want to develop a game with my own company, lets call it Indiantruckaimulator, that is very similiar to the already existing game, Eurotruck simulator. I would greatly benefit if I could use their Code/Software and simply add some changes. Is there a way for me to get access to that code, preferably through colaboration :), to be able to build upon that? Thank you for your time and answers!
You ask permission, preferably with legal counsel to handle the details. It really is that simple. Unsurprisingly, most companies don't want to give their code away- especially to a competitor. If you even get a response, they will expect something in return i.e. money. Realistically though, it's unlikely they will respond, much less deal with you.
I don't think the issue is that it is a violation of a law, but rather that it is a violation of the terms of service you agree to when you sign up for the site - which is a breach of contract. You can be sued for breach of contract, if the site can prove any damages based on your breach. So if you use a bot to make money on a site, in violation of the site's license agreement, then I believe the site could indeed sue you to get the money back. Also, the phrasing of your question ("creating a robot") raises a separate issue. It is not actually creating the bot that is illegal, but using it where not allowed can be a violation of contract. Suppose person A makes a poker bot, just as a programming exercise, and doesn't use it. But then suppose person B uses the robot created by person A on a site that forbids it. Although this could be a gray area, I do not believe the site would have any recourse against person A (even though they probably would against person B).
The &quot;Beholder&quot; was originally invented as part of AD&amp;D (2nd edition IIRC) and copyrighted by TSR (Gary Gygax and associates, essentially). WotC bought TSR and all its assets, including copyrights. There were at least two other RPGs that tried to use Beholders and other original creatures from the Monster Manual of D&amp;D and dropped them after a cease and desist order from the copyright holders. I believe one was from TSR, and one from WotC after they purchased TSR. To the best of my knowledge there was no actual copyright suit, so the validity of the copyright was never tested in court, but it is probably valid. Merely calling a creature a &quot;Beholder&quot; is not enough to violate the copyright, there would need to be actual copying of the description, or a sufficiently detailed similarity to make the use an infringement. That is always a matter of judgement, ultimately for a court in a copyright suit (or an appeals court). So, while all the possibilities mentioned in the answer by @Dale M are valid, it is additional possible that the version used by HOMM3 is not sufficiently close to the one copyrighted as part of AD&amp;D for a copyright claim to prevail, or the WotC fears that it would not prevail, and so does not spend the money to try.
Yes. The AusPat database is an excellent source for looking for Australian patents. I did a quick search for "card game" and came across 276 results fitting those keywords. Not all involve the classic generic-52-card-deck format, but some do. A good example - and one that seems similar to your idea - is "Modified blackjack game using non-standard blackjack card values", by Davinder Signh Sandhu. There's no direct link to it from AusPat.1 So yes, you can patent a card game in Australia. At the moment, I don't have enough information to answer your other two questions. 1 I found a similar American patent with more information, though I have no proof that the two are in similar formats.
You mean like Unilever, and countless others do? Yes. Many, many companies control a stable of brands, often of competing products. This is particularly prevalent in grocery lines (cleaning, food, beauty products) and motor vehicles (there are dozens of brands of motor vehicle but only a handful of automotive companies). Clearly, these products have different features (improvements) – you are entitled to segment your market anyway you like. If they are actually produced by the same company, keeping that secret would be virtually impossible. If they were separate companies (even with licencing agreements etc.), well, they are not the same company even if they have common ownership. As for having a monopoly: if you hold a patent you are allowed to have a monopoly, if you don't, expect to see knock-off rocket boots on the shelf in a week.
Yes and no. [note, the following is all written about US law. In other jurisdictions laws are, of course, different (though usually not drastically so.)] In the US there are (at least) three different bodies of law that might apply to code: copyright, patents, trade secrets. Copyright covers original expression. Anything you write is automatically, immediately protected under copyright. The copyright applies to the code itself, and anything "derived" from that code. It's up to the courts to decide exactly what "derived" means. One case that's long been viewed as a landmark in this area is Gates Rubber v. Bando Chemicals. The Court of Appeals for the tenth Circuit decision includes a section titled: "The Test for Determining Whether the Copyright of a Computer Program Has Been Infringed." Note that you can register a copyright, and that can be worthwhile, such as helping recover some damages you can't otherwise. Patents are quite different from copyrights. Where a copyright covers expression of an idea, a patent covers a specific invention. Rather than being awarded automatically, a patent has to be applied for, and awarded only after the patent office has determined that there's no relevant prior art to prevent it from being awarded. A patent, however, covers things like somebody else independently discovering/inventing what's covered by the patent. A trade secret could (at least theoretically) apply to some process or procedure embodied in the code. A trade secret mostly applies to a situation where (for example) you're trying to form an alliance with some other company, and in the process tell them things you don't tell the general public. If you've identified the fact that what you're telling them is a trade secret, and they then tell a competitor (or the general public, etc.) or more generally use that information in any way other than the originally intended purpose, it could constitute a trade secret violation. As a side-note: patents and copyright fall under federal law, so they're basically uniform nation-wide. Trade secrets mostly fall under state law, so the exact details vary by state. Absent a reason to believe otherwise, I'd guess your interest here is primarily in copyright infringement. The key here would be showing that one piece of code was derived from the other. That is, it specifically would not apply in a case where there were only a limited number of ways of doing something, so anybody who wanted to do that had to use one of those ways. Since this would not indicate actual derivation, it would not indicate copyright violation.
It does mean that you cannot reuse any parts of the source code, even small simple ones. You would have to rebuild the code from scratch. There is a significant chance that the code would be "substantially similar" to the code that you were hired to build, also that if anybody else were to write a bubble sort or 24-to-am/pm conversion routine, it would look the same, where even variable names (which should describe function) are the same or very similar. In case of an infringement lawsuit, you would have to defend yourself by showing that there are only a few ways to code a given function. Copyright protects only the "expression", not the abstract idea. A linked list is an idea, which can't be protected by copyright; same with recursion, pointers, stacks, object-oriented programming... Anything that involves copy and paste is infringement. If you re-read the copyrighted code and then try to reconstruct it, you probably crossed the infringement line. If you remember the problems and solutions and accidentally write somewhat similar code, that is probably on the safe side. From the perspective of the programmer not wanting to always reinvent the wheel, it would be most useful to make a distinction in the contract between "the essentials of the customer's program" versus "incidental utility work". The difficulty will arise in saying specifically what is essential vs. incidental. For instance, I know that if I were to hire you to develop a speech-recognition system, low-level audio-acquisition and encoding would not be essential to my purpose, whereas DSP parsing routines would be the center of my interest. The programmer would then want to retain recycling rights to all non-essential code.
The Google terms of service do not prohibit using their translate programs to create something that you sell. TOS for using their API would be irrelevant, since that isn't what you're doing. There is no clear copyright issue: as far as I can tell, there is not yet any case law suggesting that the output of a program can be owned by the copyright-holder of the program. (Copyright must be held by a legal person, i.e. an actual person or a corporation, and a program cannot yet be a legal person). A human-performed translation is subject to copyright protection since what is protected is that which is created by the (translating) author, and a program lacks that creative element. A translation owes its existence to the program-user using a particular tool to create the work, be it a pen or a translation program. What is unclear at present is whether a person using machine translation in a permitted fashion to create a derivative work thereby gains copyright to that derived work.