MongoDB Wire protocol: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License MongoDB Wire Protocol Specification is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. So as per the license, we may not use or adapt this material for any commercial purpose, such as to create a commercial database or database-as-a-service offering. But I noticed, Microsoft is using MongoDB wire protocol as a part of Cosmos DB: MongoDB API offering: Legal questions based on aforementioned matter: Is Microsoft breaching law/rules as per CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license by using MongoDB wire protocol as a part of CosmosDB offering? Can MongoDB Inc. take legal action against MS Corp. on this ground? What would be the repercussions (fine amount etc.) on MS Corp. if hypothetically, it loses the lawsuit?
They may or may not be violating the license. It's quite possible, even likely, that Microsoft has a license agreement of some sort in place with MongoDB that permits their use. Neither party, however, would be under any obligation to disclose this license to 3rd parties. If indeed there is a violation, a legal action might eventually take place. The usual first step, however, is a demand letter. Again, unless or until a court filing actually takes place, we're in the dark. Totally hypothetical here but the result could be anywhere from an agreement between the parties to damages to cease-and-desist orders. Perhaps some combination of these. I believe Microsoft has offered this service for some years now, so the lack of any visible action on MongoDB's part seems to indicate that they are good with what is going on. Microsoft has almost certainly made an agreement with MongoDB that covers this use. Note also that the license you refer to is not necessarily the only license that this product is offered under. Many companies, and I don't think MongoDB is any exception, offer &quot;free&quot; or low cost licenses for some purposes and then also offer &quot;enterprise&quot; licenses for commercial/large-scale use. As the licensor here, MongoDB is under no obligation to offer one and only one license option to potential licensees.
Is an article licensed under an Open Access license equivalent to a public domain work? No. Intellectual property practitioners and professors often describe copyright as "a bundle of sticks." This means that intellectual property laws grant the creator of a copyrightable work a large number of rights, and the creator can grant or deny others each of those rights individually. So, for instance, an author can grant a publisher the right to publish his or her book in one country, but not in another, or to copy it verbatim but not to alter it. The purpose of a license, any license, is to specify which of those rights pass to the licensee (the end user) and which stay with the licensor (the creator). This is true of creative commons just as it is for any other license. For example, many open access publishers publish under the Creative Commons CC-BY journal. This is an attribution license; it requires as a term of the license that you give credit to the original creator. This is something you would not have to do with a public domain work. In addition, under CC-BY, you have to include a copy of the license with each copy you distribute, and you cannot add your own copy protection to any copies you distribute. Again, these sort of restrictions do not apply to a public domain work. In short: the purpose of a license--any license--is to define the ways in which you can, or can not, use the licensed materials. Any license that contains any provisions restricting the licensee's use is going to be more restrictive, by definition, than the use of something in the public domain.
Yes. Content not created by a user is not protected by Section 230, and if the platform agents or employees begin to substantively edit content, the platform becomes a co-author rather than merely a platform for that content.
No. The GPL does not say 'pretend to make source code available'. The means by which the source code is made available must be equivalent to the means by which the compiled program is made available. Relevant clauses include (in version 3 of the GPL) clause 6, which says: You may [distribute your program in object form] provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License... The conveyance of source code must be in one of the prescribed ways. The one most relevant to the question (and which is illustrative of the issue at hand) is that in clause 6(d): [You may convey] the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements. The phrase 'equivalent access' means that, if you are only prepared to provide source code in an arbitrarily padded format over a very slow network link, then that is the only form in which you can provide the object code. So you will have no customers. Where you convey your software via other means such as on disk (the other subclauses of clause 6) there are similar requirements for equivalency.
If you use the reviewer's code, or code derived from it (e.g. if you just changed a variable name) then they own the copyright on that part of the software. If the reviewer describes a solution which you implement, or if you re-implement the code from scratch while taking ideas and methods from the reviewer's code, then you own the copyright on that code. However if there are only a few ways to implement something in code then the code is not creative and hence cannot be copyrighted. For example the regular expression in the question you link to is (as far as I can tell) the only correct solution to the problem: any programmer addressing the problem will have come up with that RE. In this the position is akin to a database of phone numbers: while the collection may be copyright (depending on whether selection or arrangement required creativity), the fact that Alice Jones has the number 012345 is not copyrightable, and neither is the alphabetical arrangement of names. Where it gets messy is the boundary between the two. The requirement to detect 4 or more repeated digits in a credit card number could be implemented in a number of ways, but whether there are enough of these to qualify any particular solution as "creative" would be a matter of fact for a court to decide.
The creative commons licenses explicitly include a paragraph that they cannot be revoked once granted. That is an important concept of all free licenses (CC, but also MIT, Apache etc) Now it's a fact that Flickr (and maybe other sites) do allow changing the license to something less permissive. If you use one of their images, it's really best to keep a proof that it once was available under the CC license you originally got it with. This can be e.g., a screenshot or a link to the wayback machine. Wikimedia commons is often affected by this problem, as people regularly upload files from Flickr (which is absolutely ok, if they have a CC-by-sa or similar license at the time of the upload). Commons has installed a review process for such uploads. Trusted users check that the uploaded files really have the license on Flickr that the uploader declared. If later the license on Flickr is changed by the original owner, the history on Commons is considered to be enough evidence that the license was, in fact, permissive earlier. More about this can be read here.
I'm not a lawyer, but under the law as it's written, I see two problems: 17 USC 121 allows "authorized entities" to make and publish accessible copies of works. An "authorized entity" is defined as a nonprofit organization or a governmental agency that has a primary mission to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities. So if you, as a private citizen, decide to do this, it could conceivably be copyright infringement. You might have to set up some kind of non-profit organization to make it legal. It's also OK (I think) if you make such copies for your own personal use, so long as you don't redistribute them. So far as I can tell, nothing under 17 USC 121 requires the original publisher to provide an "authorized entity" with a copy in any particular format (PDF, paper, or otherwise) for making accessible copies. Basically, the law seems to have envisioned organizations of sighted people purchasing paper copies, transcribing them, and republishing them; not blind individuals doing electronic transcription for themselves. It might still be worth contacting Hal Leonard and asking what they can do for you, but unfortunately it doesn't look like the law requires them to do anything for you. As Nij points out in the comments, this really seems to be a question about the company's policy, rather than the law.
Yes So far so good. This is a copyright violation but it is probably fair use - certainly there is case law permitting a copy of a backup digital asset to be made so I don’t see why a similar argument wouldn’t work with backing up a physical book. Clear copyright violation. Alice can rent out the original under the first sale doctrine but the ‘backup’ is not so protected. It’s not fair use because it’s use is commercial, the work is a type of work the author expects to profit from, the entire work has been copied and the use is deleterious to the market i.e. the renters are less likely to buy an original - it falls foul of all four factors of the fair use test.