What is the state of intellectual property when the owner goes bankrupt? A company makes a great game called "AwesomeGame" that costs 20€. They sell thousands of copies of the game, but ultimately go bankrupt. What is the status of the game at that point? Do any intellection-property rights or protections of it still exist?
A bankrupt company's assets are transferred to its creditors. This includes intangible assets such as trademarks, copyrights, and other intellectual property. Whoever ends up with the rights to the game can continue to market and distribute it, or use legal means to prevent others from doing so.
Copyright is hard. The movie has a copyright, and so has its ship model. This is the original copyright. The boardgame has a token. That thing has its own copyright, no matter if it's a parody of another thing or not. The copyright holder might not be the boardgame maker, but it is under copyright. In any way, parody is fair use, so no harm here. The model has a copyright, but also infringes on the film's copyright as it is a derivative of the film. If the film copyright holder wants, they can have it taken down and sue the maker. In any way, this model is available under a specific license. The model license is clearly Non Commercial. The CC-A-NC license can't be changed to one that is commercial. You can only add more No categories. The questions: 1 - No. Your work is a derivative work of both the model AND the boardgame. You don't parody the boardgame. 2 - You need a license from not one but at least two sources: the model author and the boardgame copyright holder. You might even need a license from the original film company. 3 - YES. He made the model, he can license it as he wants, but the license might be ineffective: He might have coverage under an explicit fan license with the movie company to make the model (allowing sharing under such other license) or not (when it might be silent acceptance of fan works, am implicit license or just plain lack of knowledge of the infringing model) - determining if the company wants to pursue is not your legal battle. Your battle is more likely with the copyright holder (of movie and boardgame) anyway because you lack a valid license from them. &quot;I used this infringing model and breached the license I got it under&quot; is... a very precarious point in court. 4 - No. You used the other work, you can't get out of the CC-A-NC license by altering the item. It'll always be a derivative work of the model you put in. You only get copyright in the changes. The resulting item has shared copyright with the original model maker. He gave you a license to do that, but the unbreakable condition unless you get a different license is: You can't ever sell this, you HAVE to tell them that I was part of this design.
No. These companies seem to be saying that they are entitled to sell music under some sort of mandatory licensing agreement authorized by the law of the Ukraine, or by a licensing agreement specific to the Ukraine. Even if this were true, it would only give them the right to distribute the files in the Ukraine. If an American, sitting in the U.S., makes a digital copy of a file on a Ukrainian server by copying it to his or her U.S. hard drive, they have to have a license to do so issued either by the U.S. copyright holder or authorized by U.S. law. A license to distribute in the Ukraine doesn't give the U.S. end user that license. A Ukrainian statute doesn't give the U.S. end user that license. If the end user doesn't have that license, he or she is violating the copyright holder's rights and may be civilly or criminally liable. There is no scienter requirement for copyright infringement. In fact, it's not at all clear that any Ukrainian site is operating even under this dubious legal cover. This report on Ukrainian licensing agencies by an industry group claims that many Ukrainian licensing authorities are actually scams that have no rights to distribute music under any license--one of the "rogue licensing agencies" discussed is Avtor, referenced in your first example. There is some legal confusion over what group does have permission to license music and collect royalties in the Ukraine, but it's clear that Avtor doesn't, and it certainly doesn't have permission to distribute them in the U.S. If a guy came up to you on the street and told you he had written permission from Disney to videotape their latest movies with a camcorder and sell them to you for a dollar, are you violating the law if you buy it? The answer is yes, and it's the same for these Ukrainian sites.
Adding to what Martin Bonner said: If you are a startup, and your grand plan is to be bought by a big company for a lot of money, and that big company thinks your use of React makes it risky to buy you, then you will lose out. It doesn't matter whether there is a risk, what matters is whether a potential buyer believes there is a risk. And if that is your plan, then you need to re-read Martin's answer from the point of view of a bigger company. You may not have any valuable patents, but that bigger company might. If I have an LLC with no money, then I can say "I don't care if Facebook sues me for 100 millions, I'll just let the LLC go bankrupt and start another one". If the company is worth millions or more, then the risk is much higher.
The details of this specific matter are not clear because it appears that Mane6 relented in response to a cease and desist letter, rather than be dragged through court. Since we are not privy to the letter from Hasbro, the best we can do is guess based on the degrees of freedom that exist under the law. The claim that this game was a "parody" is an affirmative defense that Mane6 would have to raise in response to a copyright infringement claim (we don't know if there were also trademark infringement claims in the letter). Then the jury would look at the arguments of the two sides to determine whether this was really "fair use", performing the "balancing act" to see how much of the original work was copied, how transformative the derived work is, what the effect on market would be. The lines drawn for making these judgments are not bright. A quick scan of a successor product Them's Fightin' Herds suggest that someone thought the artwork was too substantially similar to the Hasbro product, that is, the fighting pony version was judged to not be transformative enough. Since it didn't go to court, we'll never know.
Yes The relevant legal concepts are copyright, contract law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You are liable to be sued by the people affected for damages and/or be prosecuted by the government for the felony under either or both laws. Let's start here: "I bought a game". No, you didn't; you bought a licence to use the software in accordance with the terms of service (licence) that you freely agreed to. All modern ToS will not allow you to reverse engineer the software. If you breach those terms of service then you have broken a contract - that is what allows them to sue you. They will no doubt argue that the prevalence of cheat routines developed by people like you reduce the number of people willing to play the game - say 100,000 users x $10/month * 12 months = $12,000,000. They will also ask the court to impose punitive damages to discourage this sort of thing. Which brings us to the copyright violation. You are allowed to copy their software provided you comply with the ToS. But you didn't. Therefore you are in breach of the Copyright Act and subject to additional civil and criminal sanctions. Finally, your "cheats" access their servers in a way that the ToS doesn't authorize. This puts you in breach of the CFFA - breaking this carries serious jail time penalties. Not to mention that in the US, a criminal conviction will preclude you from many jobs, including, naturally, any with access to company computer systems. Putting aside the illegalities, cheats are unethical and ruin the game experience for hundreds of thousands of people who don't use cheats. You are a criminal - stop being one!
On what grounds would you sue? Contract Well, I think that you would struggle to find the necessary elements (see What is a contract and what is required for them to be valid?) In particular, you would struggle to prove that there was intention to create legal relations on their part and possibly on yours. Are you able to identify in your "back &amp; forth" a clear, unequivocal offer and acceptance? Without knowing the details of the "back &amp; forth": I was hoping that someone at $organization might be willing to write an article explaining what you do, the history of the organization and how it works appears on the face of it to be a request for a gift; not an offer to treat. Promissory Estoppel If you don't have a contract then it is possible (IMO unlikely) that they induced you by your actions to commit resources (your time in writing) in anticipation of a reward (them publishing what you wrote). To be estopped they would have to have known that you were writing the article in the expectation that it would have your organisation's name in it, that they did not intend for that to happen and that they allowed you to invest those resources notwithstanding. If you can prove all of that then you can require them to do what they promised. The big difficulty I see in this is did you tell them that a) you were writing the article, b) it would have your name in it and c) you expected it to be published in that form. Copyright If they publish the work or a derivative work without your permission you can sue for breach of copyright. As it stands, they probably have an implied licence to publish and you would need to explicitly revoke that. Options There are two reasons to go to court: Money Principle If you are going to court for money then this is at best a risky investment and at worst a gamble: balance your risk and reward carefully. If you are going to court for a principle then I simultaneously admire your principles and think you're an idiot. Make a deal Explain that the reason that you wrote the article was a) to support their fine publication and the fantastic work it does (even if you don't) and b) to garner good publicity for your organisation. You understand and admire their strong editorial stance (especially if you don't) but the article involved a considerable amount of work and could they see their way clear to give you a significant discount (~80%) on a full page ad facing the article.
I'd like to sell t-shirts with the direwolve emblem of the "House Stark" in Game of Thrones, and of course, I've been immediately asking myself if HBO which produces the serie actually had some copyright on that emblem. This is not a close case. Your proposal, or anything remotely similar, would almost certainly constitute a copyright violation and result in a lawsuit by the producers of the show if not done with a license from the company. They would easily win this lawsuit. The damages that they were awarded would greatly exceed the amount of profits you made from your sales (realistically, more than a $1,000 per T-Shirt plus many tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees and costs would be typical). You would probably have to go bankrupt and some or all of the damages award against you might survive bankruptcy because your copyright violation was an intentional act. Every episode of the TV show is a copyrighted work and what you are proposing would be a "derivative work" since it is derived from the copyrighted TV show. Derivative works made without a license from a a copyright holder are a violation of copyright laws. There are also probably myriad specifically trademarked symbols and phrases that are registered with the appropriate government official (the Patent and Trademark Office for U.S. trademarks). So, it is highly likely that there would be a trademark violation as well if a license was not obtained. Your basic business model is at its very heart and essence fundamentally illegal. There is nothing you can do to fix it without getting written permission from the publishers who have probably long ago sold the rights to do this to somebody else for an immense amount of money. You should abandon this idea and try to come up with another business venture instead.