Can a non-profit organization use a patent without paying a licensing fee if it makes no money on its own invention? Can a non-profit organization use a patent without paying a licensing fee if it makes no money on its own invention? Let's assume that the company designs a chip based on the x86 architecture and then makes the design open-source. Will the non-profit company have to pay Intel for using the x86 architecture or not? Assume that this is in the United States.
Patents give exclusive rights to their owner It doesn’t matter who wants to use it, they need the owner’s permission.
You can't You agreed: by submitting Materials in any form to the Company, in addition to other provisions of the Terms, you automatically grant Company a royalty-free, world-wide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and assignable right and license to use, copy, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, edit, translate, create derivative works from, transmit, distribute, publicly display and publicly perform such Materials for the purpose of displaying and promoting the Materials on any website operated by, and in any related marketing materials produced by, the Company and its affiliates. They can keep and use your data forever and give it to whoever they want. The clause you quote doesn't alter that. All it says is that once a year, if you ask, they will tell you what information they shared and with whom. If they feel like it they will tell you how to get the information deleted.
Electronic designs can be patented provided they meet the criteria for a patentable idea. But patenting a design using specific ICs is probably not a good idea as all someone has to do is redesign the same function using different ICs and they have worked around your patent. The best approach is to patent your circuit function using &quot;functional blocks&quot; that are more generic so that the overall circuit's function, which is the novel idea, it patented and not the specific implementation. Patents can be tricky to navigate. You might do well to consult a patent attorney who can advise you how best to protect your intellectual property.
united-states You are protected by copyright as a matter of law, even if you don't post a copyright notice, although you have slightly more procedural rights if you do post a copyright notice and there would need to be a filing with the copyright registrar (a division of the Library of Congress) before you brought suit. You can't really get any other intellectual property protections for it except possibly a trademark if you have a distinctive mark or name or logo for the app.
An investor can require, as a condition of making an investment, that key management and creative employees of the company agree to a non-compete agreement. If such employes choose not to sign such an agreement, the investor will not invest. This is quite common. If Alice has signed such an agreement, she may not be able to start a new company with such new applications without permission from the existing company. She can surely write such applications for the existing company and get it to modify its business to use them. If Alice (still) owns a controlling share, she can simply order the company to modify or expand its business model. If she has sold enough of the company that she no longer controls it, she must persuade those who do control it to adopt her ideas. Any non-compete agreement must be limited, both in the range of activities it covers, and in the tiem for which it is valid. Some US states impose specific limit on these factors. An agreement tht exceeds such limits will not be enforceable. If Alice was employed by the company at the time she wrote any of these apps, the code may well be owned by the company, either under the work-made-for-hire copyright rule (see 17 USC 101) or under a specific contract of employment. Investors are likely to demand that such a contract be signed before they invest in a tech startup. Alice will also have a duty not to act contrary to the company's interests while employed by it. In the absence of non-compete agreements, Alice might not be prevented from founding or joining a competing company, but may not be able to use work done while employed by the first company for the benefit of a new one.
An LLC can obtain a 501(c)(3) designation, but all its members/owners must also be 501(c)(3) non-profits. So if Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity and Goodwill got together to start an LLC, that LLC could obtain a 501(c)(3) designation. If a human person is a member of an LLC, that LLC cannot obtain a 501(c)(3) designation. I don't think there's any reason a for-profit LLC could not accept donations from Patreon or Kickstarter, but those donations would generally be treated as income, the same as money received in exchange for goods.
As @amon stated in a comment, copyright requires creativity. If the author of a tool wants to claim copyright on the output of that tool, then that output must contain something that required the creativity of the tool author. For a tool that just re-indents its input, the output is created from the input with a mechanical, non-creative, transformation and the output does not contain any creative content that wasn't already present in the input. For that reason, authors of such tools can't claim any copyright on the output. For a tool like bison, which was mentioned in the comments, the output contains a measurable amount of creative content that was not present in the input, but which was provided by the authors of bison. For that reason, the authors of 'bison' do have a copyright claim on the output of the tool (for which they give a broad permission to use). So, the basic question becomes, how much of the (creative) content of the output can be traced back to the tool itself and not to the input that the tool processed. For linters/formatters, that is likely to be very little. For code generators, it can be anywhere between very little and all of the output. The license restrictions on the code produced by the tool itself are by default the same as the license restrictions on the source of the tool, but the tool author can choose to apply any other license to the tool code that ends up in the output. If the output of the tool is, at least in part, dependent on an input file, then the authors of the input file also have a copyright claim on the tool output (as their creative work influenced the output), so the tool author can not claim exclusive ownership. The usual situation is that for tools that don't add creative content to the output, the author explicitly states that the don't have any copyright claims on the output. For tools that do add creative content, that content might be released under very permissive conditions (like, "you can use the output as a whole for any purpose, but you can only separate out the code that comes from the tool's codebase if you adhere to the &lt;X> license")
I've been wondering if it is possible to hire / create a company with someone who would open a restaurant in my place and manage it according to my guidelines. Yes, of course. You can do it just like you described: Create a company, hire employees, (let them) open the restaurant. You, as the owner of the company, could set up whatever guidelines you have in mind, and your employees would be bound by them (limited only by general laws, such as on health and safety). Some caveats, however: You will need money to set this up - for buying / renting space for the restaurant, for paying your employees, obtaining supplies, initial marketing etc. It may take a while until the restaurant earns money (if ever), and you'll need money in the mean time. Someone will need to manage, that is make decisions. You can do that yourself, but then you will work for the restaurant (which you write you do not want to do). Or you can hire someone to do it for you, but that will cost more (in salary), plus you will have to find someone you can trust. That's a tradeoff for you to make. I guess it'd be like an intellectual property. That depends, but usually there will be little in terms of intellectual property. If you have a unique idea for the restaurant, you could patent it, but there are many restrictions on what you can protect, and ways around it, plus this also costs money (a lot if you need a lawyer's advice). Apart from that, you can register a trademark for the restaurant, but that only protects the name / logo, not any ideas. Finally, some of your ideas might be considered trade secrets, but again the protection is limited. In general, there is no blanket "idea protection". If you have a good idea for a restaurant, in most cases other restaurants will be able to copy them, possibly with slight changes - take that into account.