What is the difference between CC-BY-SA with attribution and MIT with attribution? You may have seen The MIT License – Clarity on Using Code on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange and A New Code License: The MIT, this time with Attribution Required. But I'm no legal expert, and I'm confused what the changes would include. What's the difference between CC-By-SA and MIT, and what about with attribution?
Broadly speaking, the difference is the "sharealike" clause of CC-BY-SA. Any derivative of a CC-BY-SA work must itself be licensed CC-BY-SA, whereas a derivative of an "MIT with attribution" work can be under any license the author wants. There are a number of other differences in the fine print (eg. CC forbids DRM, where MIT doesn't), but that's the big one.
The notification that you saw is not useful legal information for you: stuff always belongs to whoever owns the stuff. It might be interpreted as saying "it doesn't belong to us", but you can't count on that (it's virtually guaranteed that at least some of the content there is owned by the website owner). A more informative statement would be "You will have to get permission from the content owner to copy their stuff", and "We're not going to spend time figuring out who owns what". You could read the terms of service (try this with Stack Exchange) to see what the site tells people. The TOS here says that if you contribute anything, it "is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license". You can then look up what that license says and learn what that allows. Websites are kind of tricky, though, because it's not hard to change the wording of a TOS, and you need to know what specific TOS was promulgated at the time a particular contribution was unleashed. Usual practice is to think it through carefully and not frequently tweak the TOS, but it's not illegal to change the TOS. Note that copyright law does not prohibit you from using other people's stuff, it prohibits you from copying. The distinction is clearer when you see a post that explains an algorithm with actual code, you read and learn and make use of that, but write your own code. As a user out there, if there isn't a clear indication that stuff posted is there for the taking, under some public license (as is the case with SE), then getting specific permission to copy, from the owner of the content (possibly untraceable), would be necessary. Now assume that you're a moderator or site-owner of some forum: presumably (hopefully) you have a TOS that addresses that situation, which says that moderators have the right to edit or delete content at their sole discretion, and also you say what kinds of posts are prohibited. Such an statement is not absolutely mandatory for all things, but it may be necessary to avoid litigation over some acts. One one end of the spectrum, it would be illegal for a forum to host child porn, stolen credit card numbers, or protected digital content. If a user were to post such stuff, the site would need to eliminate that stuff, and the poster could not legally rely on an argument of the type "That's my stuff, you have no right to mess with it". On the other hand, if a forum actually requires paid membership, then there may be a strong contractual expectation that the user is getting something of value, so you would have to watch for statements that could be interpreted as broad permission to put stuff out there without any interference. (For instance, a file-hosting service would have only minimal restrictions on content, aimed at protecting their own legal interests; whereas a political-advocacy site would have maximal interest in prohibiting the expression of views counter to the cause). Thus the SE TOS has you "grant Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works", which allows moderators to correct typos, delete offensive wording, and obliterate entire posts. If a site fails to have any such clauses in their TOS, then it might be a matter that has to be settled in court, whether they have the right to eliminate "spam" (i.e. advertising for a service, especially if the reason for getting an account was to provide an advertising platform). In light of the limited use sanctioned by the TOS, per the below comment, legal copying will be quite limited. However, "fair use" a situation where copying is allowed, regardless of what the TOS may say. (You could be banned from the site, but you could not be sued for infringement). Fair use was invented precisely so that people could make comments like "Jones advocates an absurd law, saying '...[quote from Jones]...'". Thus you can comment on a post and quote the relevant part ("The lines '[... quoting the code ...]' results in an infinite loop"). See the Fair Use FAQ for more details.
See https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service and https://law.stackexchange.com/help/licensing. As with most social media sites, your contribution of content does not transfer ownership of any copyright in the content; rather, you grant to the platform a non-exclusive license. Because the license is not exclusive, you can grant similar or different licenses to other parties, which generally happens when you post the same content on other sites. (Of course, you can only grant licenses when you own the copyright or have a license that allows you to grant a further license, so posting content created by others can be complicated; this seems to be beyond the scope of the question, though, so I mention it only in passing.) To answer with respect to a specific site, of course, you have to look at the site's terms of service.
I am assuming that you are in the United States for this question. Please correct me if this is not the case. MathWorks still holds the right to take action, which may be anything from cease-and-desist letters up to litigation. You have followed the correct process in asking for permission to use a trademark. The owner of the trademark, MathWorks, has given you their answer, which is quite simply, "no". You may not feel that their reasoning is fair, but the default state of trademarks is that they are under ownership of whomever created them, and you do not have permission to use them. Things will remain that way unless MathWorks changes their mind. It doesn't matter if it feels dismissive of them; they are under no obligation to even consider requests to use their marks. If they didn't explicitly say, "sure, go ahead", or even, "yes, you may use it provided you follow a list of conditions", then using their trademark will be an unlicensed usage. If you still would like to pursue getting permission to use their trademarked assets, you will need to try to contact them again. Until they say otherwise, using their trademarks will be considered unauthorized use. (Edited to add this clarification brought up by @David Siegel): However, your usage might not be violation of trademark. The primary purpose of trademark restriction is to stop someone from misrepresenting a product as being from the entity that owns the trademark; this stops someone from, for example, selling a cola soft drink called "Coke-a-Cola". The reasons for this are manyfold, but the basic idea is that allowing that type of usage means that consumers might not be able to tell that your product is distinct from the original, and could then mistakenly attribute the quality and level of service of the previous brand with the new product. If your usage of MATLAB marks is such that you are identifying the products used as from MathWorks, and not yourself, and are doing everything in good faith to disassociate your website and/or offerings from MathWorks, it is possible that your usage would be considered correct usage of trademark. Even if it is legal usage, MathWorks still may decide to take action. If MathWorks believes that your usage is unauthorized and that it is trademark violation, they may decide to take action. This is regardless of whether it actually is; until you have this case in front of a court, you will not get a definitive answer. We cannot answer whether this is a legal usage of trademark. Ultimately, whether or not a usage of a mark is considered to be correct usage is a question that can only be answered by the courts, which means the only person who can give you concrete advice on a course of action is a lawyer. In lieu of proper legal advice, you will need to weigh the risk of MathWorks taking action against your usage with the benefit you receive from usage. (Edited to add this clarification by @Dale M): Regardless, you may be breaking copyright by using the logo. There is a separate issue besides just trademark at play here. The copyright for the MATLAB logo belongs to whomever created it/owns it (presumably, MathWorks in this case). Using the logo without permission is a copyright violation. The only case in which this would not be a violation is if the logo is released for use in general under a compatible license, such as Creative Commons; do note that these licenses typically have additional conditions, such as requiring attribution. If you are unaware as to whether there is a such a license, or if you fail to follow the terms of the license, usage of the logo almost certainly constitutes copyright infringement.
Various elements could be legal, or not. For example, it is legal to require students to do things in order to pass a class. It is legal to require a student to write a program for a course (entirely, or in part). It is legal for a teacher to give a &quot;group grade&quot;. It is not clear whether it is legal to require the student to assign copyright or license to the teacher / school – it may be legal to require a student to pay for their class, and copyright transfer might be valuable consideration for such a contract (assuming that there is a contractual relation at all as opposed to a statutory mandate – e.g. &quot;high school&quot;). If this is a public school, you can't make students pay for a mandatory class, therefore you cannot require assignment of copyright. It is very probably illegal for the student to access the educational records of other students, but the app could be developed with dummy data.
The reason is 17 USC 106: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following... (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work The original picture is the underlying protected work. The ASCII reproduction is a derivative work. If you get permission to make the derivative work, it is okay. Otherwise, it is copyright infringement. There is an escape clause, "fair use", which amounts to taking a chance that you won't be sued and then arguing that you didn't do them any prohibited harm. If you make any money off of the game, you have a major strike against you. I suggest reading the fair use FAQ; basically, it is really hard to know how a fair use defense will fare, but based on prior cases, I'd say it's infringement, not fair use.
Whoever "derived" the illegal derivative work most likely has copyright in his derivations, unless they are not worth copyright protections. Say I take the Harry Potter books and add a few chapters and try to sell it - that's copyright infringement of course, but I have the copyright on these additional chapters. However, I don't have the right to allow you to copy the derived work. And even if you have the right to copy the original work, you don't have the right to copy the derived work because it is a different work. I could extract my changes, and allow you to take them and do with them what you like. You could then create an illegally derived work yourself. I couldn't sue you, but the original copyright holder could. To the comments: One, a work and a derivative of the work are not the same, so even if you have the right to make a copy of a work, that doesn’t give you any right whatsoever to copy a derivative work - they are not the same work. Two, the copyright holder has the exclusive right to control copying and the creation of derivative works. If the copyright holder doesn’t want derivatives to exist, then creating them, copying them etc. is always copyright infringement.
a few quick notes that come to mind. As the commenters point out: DSGVO is indeed the German equivalent name to the GDPR (English term) "Imprint" isn't a privacy related topic that much, as such it's not really changed by the upcoming GDPR The GDPR changes many things, but the requirement for up front information isn't one of them - so it would've already been a rule to follow Sometimes the question who is responsible for privacy information might not be that easy to decide when you're on platforms. I take this situation as being pretty clear though. You are basically given a blank slate, you can do with that page whatever you want, and the visitor has no clue whatsoever that it might be hosted by Github. In addition to this, Github would be classified as a data processor (providing the tool) and you as the data controller who is in charge of practically everything except for the provision of the page. I hope this helps. Btw. it's not that hard anymore to write a privacy policy these days.