Do Github Projects by Germans Require an &quot;Imprint&quot; (Link) in their Readme? As is discussed in various places, German law requires an "imprint"/"Impressum" (a page with some contact information, such as a physical address and an e-mail address, on the person responsible for the site) for virtually every1 website. In a recent question, it was asked whether this also applies to sites hosted on Github Pages. That question can be answered in a pretty straightforward way (sites hosted on Github Pages are basically no different from any other website, as the author has full and sole control over the appearance of the page. This question refers to the default appearance of projects on Github, though. Authors have no influence on the general appearance of these projects, as Github displays them in their default layout. The introductory page of a project displays the repository content (the files stored for the project) and is arguably somewhat customizeable in that the content of a file called readme.md from the repository will be displayed below the files list, if it exists. Now, "common sense" (sorry, could not resist) would tell me that Github owns and controls this page and is thus the first point of contact for any "official" activity. However, it seems that German courts are increasingly ruling that placing, or at least linking to such an "imprint" is also required on various social network profile sites such as Facebook or Google+2. On the other hand, the requirement for an "imprint" on business social networks such as Xing and LinkedIn seems to be disputed even for businesses presenting themselves there3. Therefore, my question is: Is at least the requirement of an "imprint" on social media profiles limited to actually commercial enterprises, or are all German owners of Github projects who do not link to an "imprint" in their readme.md (if even that is sufficient, given that this link may not be intuitively discoverable) vulnerable to receiving costly cease-and-desist letters? Related bonus "question": Exemplary links to Github projects by German owners that are "doing it right" are appreciated. 1: There are some exceptions for "purely personal" sites, but any information I can find in German implies that nothing that might be of interest to any stranger on the web can possibly "purely personal" in the interpretation of German courts. 2: General information in English, some more information in German: 1, 2, 3, 4 3: Two articles in German: 1, 2
Impressum Requirement Wow, based on your citations, you've done a lot of research on this topic. I'm just going to add one more reference, which is from the same site as your first German citation and has incredibly detailed and judicially referenced information on almost everything related to the Impressum. All my non-GitHub links are to sections of that page. Based on your research, I'm going to take it for granted that you understand that according to the Telemediengesetz (TMG), an Impressum is required on a web page if it is &quot;business-like&quot; (geschäftsmäßig), or if it helps, I prefer to word it as &quot;potentially commercial.&quot; I would have to argue that open source projects have to be seen as inherently &quot;business-like&quot; for the purposes of the TMG for two reasons: Some other legal person may have similar software as part of their business and might have the need to serve legal notifications to the owner of a GitHub project (TMG § 8 gives competitors the right to sue). Think potential copyright violations here. It is possible to build a more traditional commercial business around open source, for example what Canonical is doing around Ubuntu. Additionally, the common legal advice is to even include an Impressum on a personal blog, though I'm not aware of any court case having occurred at that level yet. In my opinion, a GitHub account can be seen as more &quot;business-like&quot; than a personal blog, and would follow that advice out of caution. I'll note that the XING situation you bring up is complicated. It centers over whether the content of XING pages is &quot;business-like&quot; according to the TMG. It may well turn out that some pages will need an Impressum and others won't. As for placing it in the project's readme.md, that might work but I have two concerns: The courts have essentially stated that the text of the link must imply that the required information under TMG § 5 is located there. For example, the words Impressum and Kontakt work, but the word Information does not. To me, &quot;readme&quot; is not sufficient, but this concern might be negated by the fact GitHub by default renders the readme.md directly on the project home page. While it has been ruled that the Impressum does not necessarily have to be directly on the home page (for GitHub, that would be the company's/users profile page), it must still be readily available in an intuitive location. I don't know if putting it in a project page satisfies the legal requirement. If it was sufficient, it's also likely that each project would have to have an Impressum so that it can't be missed. Examples The dominant pattern that I could find1 on GitHub is an off-site link to the Impressum contained in the profile page's byline right underneath the title. Examples: https://github.com/sedadigital, https://github.com/comsysto, https://github.com/znes, https://github.com/eSagu, https://github.com/TIBHannover. I'm almost certain this meets or exceeds the legal requirements. Example screenshot: Additionally, I found a few that had a repository specifically for an Impressum. Example: https://github.com/johsteffens. Since these repositories were clearly visible on the user's main page (either because there weren't enough repositories to make them span multiple pages, or because it was specifically pinned to the main page), I would argue these also meet the legal requirement for being readily available. While I didn't find any examples of it, another possibility would be to combine the above two approaches, having a link in the byline that links to an Impressum repository or some other page within GitHub. This would be useful if you didn't otherwise have an Impressum hosted elsewhere. There were also scattered examples of people placing an Impressum on a project wiki page or on an impressum.md file at the top level. However, none of the users I looked at were consistent in doing this across all their projects. Also as previously mentioned, it's questionable whether not having it on the main user profile page meets the legal requirement. The Wiki page in particular I don't think meets the requirement that it can easily be found. Found using the following Google search: site:github.com impressum -impressum.php -impressum.html -impressum.jsp -impressum-manager -github.io -issue. Exclusions meant to filter out a lot of false positives, mostly projects for websites that had their Impressum in code format meant for deploy and not for display on GitHub itself.
This is similar to giving a hammer and needing to state to one is not responsible if the taker uses it to hit their head with. I believe this is the wrong analogy to use here. It would be more like giving somebody a hammer and saying you are not responsible if the head flies off and injures you. There is a concept in &quot;things&quot; you obtain called &quot;fitness for purpose&quot;, so if you download open-source software like a registry cleaner, and it deletes your entire registry, the &quot;WTFPL&quot; doesn't absolve the authors of liability. Explicitly denying any kind of &quot;fitness for purpose&quot; or warranty helps shield the author from legal claims (even if they are meritless) because it kills it out of the gate. It's possible that the WTFPL license granter/author could still be sued and have to defend themselves in court because it isn't explicitly stated that there is no warranty or fitness for purpose. Open source does not mean that it's &quot;use at your own risk&quot;, which is why there are so many types of licenses and disclaimers. From comments: Thank you for this very clear answer. Does the fact that someone willingly retrieves free code with no control of the provider changes anything? (vs a software vendor which provides code suitable for A and B, in exchange for money) I think closer to your hammer analogy where I would sue the producer of hammer XXX, a hammer I found on the street or which was given to me without involvement of vendor XXX. No, this doesn't change anything. The software vendor here is the person who writes the code, even if they don't charge for it. They are the ones who license the software and they are the ones who take some level of responsibility for it. In this case, the software author is the &quot;hammer producer&quot; that you would sue... If you buy &quot;Registry Cleaner XL&quot; from Best Buy and it bricks your computer, you don't sue Best Buy, you sue the person who authored the software. In pretty much every case, the author is the responsible party, not the vendor, and it is the author who licenses it, not the vendor (the vendor just acts as an intermediary).
https://www.schäffel.ch/allgemein_de.html: &quot;Die Fonts dürfen für private und professionelle Zwecke unbeschränkt verwendet werden. Sie kommen vollständig und mit allen Einbettungsrechten. Es wird gebeten, jegliche Modifikation der Datensätze, den Vertrieb unter anderen Namen, die Verteilung auf anderen Websites als dieser oder die Eingliederung in Font-Pakete zu unterlassen.&quot; That is, The fonts may be used without restriction for private and professional purposes. They come complete and with all embed rights. Please refrain from any modification of the data sets, distribution under other names, distribution on websites other than this one or incorporation into font packages.
Section 1 of the GPLv3 states: The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. The Corresponding Source need not include anything that users can regenerate automatically from other parts of the Corresponding Source. So Makefiles are clearly included if they exists. The point of the GPL is to let the user be free to modify the code. A lot of projects are very hard to modify without the scripts used to fetch dependencies &amp; build the executable so not providing means to build the code would go against the license spirit.
It is not obvious that it violates the TOS (which is a complex wall of text and links to chase). §3 states that &quot;we need you to make the following commitments&quot;, followed by some subsections – you can re-interpret this as an agreement on your part to do this stuff. Those subsections relate to &quot;legitimate accounts and users&quot; (not relevant), &quot;what you can do&quot; (potentially relevant), &quot;permissions you give&quot; (granting them license to use your stuff), not infringing on their copyright. The second subsection about what you can &quot;do&quot; says that you can't &quot;violate these or other terms&quot;, or do anything unlawful, or infringing, nor may you upload viruses, or scrape Facebook data. So it turns out that there is nothing specific in that subsection, but it does say that you won;t violate &quot;other terms&quot;. §5 presents a bunch of other possible terms and policies: Community Standards, Commercial Terms, Advertising Policies, Self-Serve Ad Terms, Facebook Pages, Groups and Events Policy, Meta Platform Terms, Developer Payment Terms, Community Payment Terms, Commerce Policies, Meta Brand Resources, Music Guidelines and Live Policies. Those primarily apply to advertisers, group-pages, developers, commercial use and content broadcast via Meta. Community Standard applies to everybody, and as you should predict there is a long list of specific sub-categories such as &quot;Violence and Criminal Behavior&quot;, &quot;Safety&quot;, &quot;Objectionable Content&quot;, &quot;Inauthenticity&quot; etc. You would have to hire a lawyer to do an exhaustive search and interpretation. However, it appears that using an ad blocking app is not forbidden on FB, and that seems to be what that extension is. But you should read it for yourself. All. Of. It. It may have violated the older TOS, but that clause seems to me missing from the present TOS.
All your work is yours. They've made it very clear it wasn't a work for hire, so it's yours. They can't copyright any of their ideas. You can't copyright an idea. Only specific creative elements authored by them and present in your work could be covered by copyright. You didn't use their block diagrams. I don't see how references to other sites to look at would constitute a creative element they authored. That said, you probably want to talk to a lawyer and get a written legal opinion that you can rely on.
Disclaimer: I'm from the US and don't claim to know German or Turkish law. So let me discuss some general principles here, but details may well be different in Germany and Turkey. You're mixing together three very different things: trademark, copyright, and patent. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, in this case, the exact computer code, images, etc. If you didn't copy his code, the chance that you would coincidentally write identical code is remote. The fact that you both have a line of code that says x=x+1 wouldn't give him any grounds for a lawsuit. He'd have to show substantial portions of the code were identical. If you didn't deliberately copy his code, this isn't going to happen. Barring some extraordinary and unbelievable coincidence, you can't violate copyright accidentally. Trademark protects names and symbols used to identify a company or a product. If you decided to call your software company "Microsoft", then that other Microsoft could sue you for trademark infringement. Likewise if you copied somebody else's logo or other distinctive graphics. This is very different from copyright. It is quite possible to violate someone's trademark accidentally. Especially if he gave his company or product a rather generic name. Like if someone called his product, say, "Password Manager", someone else might make a product with the same name without ever having heard of the original. Ditto if he has some simple logo or other graphics. If you did accidentally duplicate a name or graphic elements, well, in the US a court would likely order you to change your name or graphics and that would be the end of it, unless you refused, in which case you'd end up in court. US Courts have ruled that very generic names have limited trademark protection. An example I saw recently was "Main Street Auto Repair". A court said that the owner of that name could prevent someone else from opening a shop in the same town with the same name, but he couldn't sue someone in another town who happened to use the same name. This is why, by the way, companies often use made-up words for their product names. In your case, this should be a trivial issue. If he is claiming trademark to the look of the main menu screen, just change the colors or move some buttons around. If it actually went to court, you should be able to argue that the similarity was accidental and when you were informed you promptly changed it, and that should be the end of it. Depending, I guess, on how hard-nosed the judge is, etc. Patents are different still. A patent gives the owner the exclusive right to use an invention or process for a specified period of time. It doesn't matter if you invented the same thing entirely independently. Whoever filed the patent first has exclusive rights. There have been cases where an inventor lost out to someone with a similar invention because he submitted his patent application one day later. If this other person has patents that you are infringing, you are pretty much out of luck.
User manuals are indeed copyrighted. On the other hand, since the people building the cranes are most likely interested in people reading these manuals, there is a good chance that you would get permission to copy them, for example as part of a mobile app, if you ask the manufacturer. On the other hand, it is possible that the manual was written by a third party, who receives some fixed amount of money for every manual that the manufacturer gives away to customers for free. In that case, copying would destroy that persons earnings, so permission would be unlikely. You definitely need to ask for permission and can't go forward without permission. It would also be possible that the crane manufacturer will want to check out your app to make sure that everything is correct - if someone damages a crane because of some omissions in your app, that would be very bad for them.