Is there an EU regulation mandating companies&#39; IT equipment to be changed every three months? I had visited with my university a Greek IT company that specializes in refurbishing used computers and peripherals. The executive that toured us had mentioned that there is an EU regulation that requires companies to change their "computerization equipment" (both software and hardware) every three (or maybe it was six) months. As a CS student, it seemed very strange to me that the EU is mandating such a short lifespan for devices that typically last for more than a year, so I pressed for more details, saying that a PC with a 4th-Gen Intel CPU (which she was talking about that time) is still very usable, and that Greek accounting laws state that the IT equipment's useful life for the purpose of depreciation is five years (perfectly reasonable). Her reply was that they can't do anything since that was an EU regulation, and that the Greek laws exemplify that the Greek state is a technological laggard. This whole story seemed very fish to me. Is there actually such regulation?
No, there is no EU regulation mandating companies' IT equipment to be changed every three months.
Copyright law is a country-by-country matter. Most countries are signatories to the Berne Convention, which provides a common framework, but there are still variations, generally in the duration of copyright or the definition of copyrightable material. According to the Hirtle chart, a video game that was first published in Europe in the year 2000 and subsequently published in the United States is still copyrighted in both the United States and whichever European countries it was published in. It is likely to be a work of corporate authorship, so the US copyright will expire on January 1, 2096 (unless a law extending the duration is passed). In the United States, the requirement to register a copyright was eliminated in 1989 as part of the Berne Convention Implementation Act; registration still provides benefits when filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Most European countries eliminated their registration requirements much earlier, if they had them at all: the Berne Convention dates from 1887. Copyright does not simply cease to exist when the owner does, or if the owner cannot be determined. The difficulty of tracking down copyright holders for old or little-known works is the driving force behind orphaned works legislation. There are no orphaned works laws in the United States, and since copyright is country-by-country, European laws won't help you if you're interested in publishing in the US. In order to track down the copyright holder, you'll need to figure out who originally held the copyright (probably the publisher, but it could be either development company, or both, or the game might be a collective work of the individuals who worked on it). If it was a work of corporate authorship, and none of the game-copyright sales mention it, copyright will have been transfered when the company owning the copyright was sold (as part of a general "and all intellectual property" clause).
This doesn't sound like fraud (against you, at least), but it does sound like an unfair or deceptive trade practice, which is outlawed by Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and perhaps the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, both of which prohibit unfair and deceptive trade practices. I don't know about Pennsylvania, but the FTC has on many occasions taken action against companies for engaging in just this kind of behavior. To find out whether you would be able to take action against the other company, you'd want to find a good competition lawyer in Pennsylvania. For some more basic background on the FTC's rules, check out this primer.
You could certainly allow twitter to delete the exchange, unless it is part of some record that the law in the relevant country require to be retained, which would be quite unusual. That would depend on the nature of the exchange, and the particular law requiring that records be retained. However, if the request is to be able to demand that Twitter delete the exchange, that would be much harder. In general a person or business is entitled to retain copies of communications, such as emails, sent to that person or entity. There is the &quot;right to be forgotten&quot; which applies under EU law, but that would not apply to records which a business needed to retain for its own legitimate purposes, and was not posting publicly, as I understand it. In any case Twitter is not an EU business, so I am not sure if the right would apply at all. (Twitter has an office in Amsterdam, so teh GDPR and other EU law clearly applies to it.) There might be some other basis on which such a demand could be made, depending on the detailed circumstances and the specific jurisdiction, but I cannot think of one offhand.
You are suggesting strict liability for software bugs. You haven't tried to show any negligence or incompetence on Microsoft's part, but just appear to have assumed that the existence of a bug that causes harm should create liability. Strict liability is rare, at least in the US, and does not in general apply to software. Given strict adherence to the best practice in developing software, there will be bugs, so a bug is not itself evidence of any sort of wrongdoing on Microsoft's part. In real life, if there was strict liability for software bugs, nobody and no business would write software for the use of others, because of the ever-present potential of being wiped out by lawsuits despite all they could do.
It is mildly hard to say. First, one has to determine if he was an employee hired to do something like invent the WWW. He "spent time" at CERN, but was an independent contractor in his first period (1980), then took up a fellowship in 1984. "Fellowship" is generally not an "employment" relationship in the relevant sense, and academics are rarely "employees" in the common law work-for-hire sense. It is reported that he "began creating the software and standards for the web on his own as an informal project within CERN". So if anyone holds IP rights (to what?), it would be him. Given where CERN is, it is not self-evident whose copyright law would be applicable. He reports that he wrote the code in CERN Building 31, which appears to be in France, though CERN appears to be in Switzerland (CERN is, in fact, in France and Switzerland). Article 17 of Swiss copyright law says Where a computer program has been created under an employment contract in the course of discharging professional duties or fulfilling contractual obligations, the employer alone shall be entitled to exercise the exclusive rights of use. and otherwise, "work for hire" is not an applicable concept under Swiss law. France, which has the same basic droit d'auteur concept, also have the software exception in Intellectual Property Code Article L113-9: Unless otherwise provided by statutory provision or stipulation, the economic rights in the software and its documentation created by one or more employees in the execution of their duties or following the instructions given by their employer shall be the property of the employer and he exclusively shall be entitled to exercise them. In either venue there is a very narrow path for CERN to hold the copyright to the original software, one that is not likely to match the facts of Berners-Lee's relationship with CERN. It is also true that CERN created a version of web software (the usable version), which was released into the public domain Apr. 30 1993 (p1, p2). It is likewise known that he approved of, and propagated the release of the IP that we associate with the WWW into the public domain. The idea underlying the web is not subject to copyright protection (the text of the proposal would be), but the original code that he wrote would be. It is unknown what relationship exists between that original code any current code, but it highly unlikely that any current code copies original code. Further speculation about the relationship between the original code and anything that exists now would have to be addressed in a History of Computing SE (if there were such a thing). As for patents, since he did not patent the method, it is ipso facto unprotected and out in the open. From the legal POV, the world wide web is not a single thing, so it is meaningless to ask who has dominion over it.
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.
According to this site in the UK apparently there are laws against calling something free if it was part of the entire package before or if was added later and the price went up Example of the latter: LG sold a TV. They then added a sound bar, increased the price and listed the TV as TV for $XXX + free sound bar. They ran afoul of the regulations Also adding something and calling the addition free is okay if the price didn't go up but you can only advertize it as free for 6 months. After 6 months the law considers it included by default and therefore no longer free.