Is it legally binding to have a racist clause in a software license? If I have a software license and somewhere in it states something to the effect of "Only white people can use this software", is it legally binding in the United States?
A software license is a form of giving permission to a person to make a copy of copyrighted material. In this case, the license would be a contract, not a bare license (an open source license may be a bare license, assuming it grants all rights without assigning those rights). The problem is that copyright infringement is governed by federal law, and breach of contract is a state matter. The author gets two cracks at the matter, as copyright infringement, and as breach. There are federal laws against racial discrimination, passed under PL. 88-352. The prohibition of racial discrimination is an enumerated prohibition: you can't, when it comes to voter registration, "public accommodations", schools, labor, and things about the government, but this doesn't extend to absolutely everything. The concept of "public accommodation" comes closest to being an applicable basis for saying "no, it would be illegal", but such an accommodation has to be provided in a physical establishment. The interpretation of "public accommodation" is discussed in this article, which predates internet sales by decades. One might then think that Title II is irrelevant. If the software is sold in a store, that location is plainly a public accommodation, and Title II would render that clause illegal. So to continue the discussion, we have to assume that this was an internet sale. National Federation of the Blind v. Scribd Inc., 97 F. Supp. 3d 565 is a case of interest, involving discrimination for an internet-only business. Citing a wealth of prior cases that don't clearly decide the matter, that court found that the text of the law is insufficient, and other means must be called on to make the determination: While no circuit court has directly addressed whether a website with no physical retail outlet or building open to the public can be a place of public accommodation under Title III, clearly there is more than one reasonable interpretation of the language at issue here. Therefore, the Court may go beyond the text and context of the text to understand the statute's meaning. Canons of construction don't yield clarity either. The court found that legislative intent resolves the matter. The exact reasons are way too long and involved to summarize, but it comes down to distinguishing legislative intent in the case of the Civil Rights Act, versus the later ADA. Citing congressional committee reports, the court found that It was "critical" to define places of public accommodation more broadly than the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because "discrimination against people with disabilities is not limited to specific categories of public accommodations." "Public accommodation" has two different definitions, one (Civil Rights Act) pertaining to discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin, and the other (ADA) based on disability. There does not seem to be case law establishing that an internet-only sale is subject to the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act, and some evidence that it is not. The case of Noah v AOL Time Warner, involving alleged religious discrimination in an online chat site, was dismissed for many reasons, one being: Even assuming, arguendo, that plaintiff's Title II claim is not barred by § 230, it must nonetheless be dismissed for failure to state a claim because AOL's chat rooms and other online services do not constitute a "place of public accommodation" under Title II. ... Yet, as the relevant case law and an examination the statute's exhaustive definition make clear, "places of public accommodation" are limited to actual, physical places and structures, and thus cannot include chat rooms, which are not actual physical facilities but instead are virtual forums for communication provided by AOL to its members. A website where one could download software is even less of a public accommodation. So since there is no clear federal bar to racial discrimination in a software license, it is plausible that an infringement case could survive. It is not clear how the case would fare in state courts, since states often have even stricter anti-discrimination laws which could render that condition in the contract unenforceable. The clause might be deemed illegal on general "public policy" grounds. If the contract (license) has a severability clause, the overall license should survive, just omitting the racial restriction. Without such a clause... if the contract is held to be void, the customer does not have permission to copy (which comes from the contract), and thus has infringed copyright law. Insofar as there is no serious question that the courts would find such a license to be repugnant, it is hard to imagine the courts saying "but, by the letter of the law, this is allowed". The most likely path for reaching that end is for a higher court to disregard a part of Noah and discover that internet sales fall within the category of public accommodation. This issue has not been clearly decided to the best of my knowledge, and it's not at all easy to compute the federal outcome based on statutory and case law.
Is this legal? Generally yes, unless it unlawfully exceeds the scope of the license. Also, if it is, how can I check if it's permitted by the original store's EULA? Read the whole EULA, focusing on terms related to resale, assignment, and transferability.
Of course you have to follow the license. You seem to have a license that doesn't allow distribution and want to know if giving copies to the Dutch or Chinese branch of your company is distribution. First, you should not make that decision. Your company's lawyers should do that. Second, such distribution is with some licenses perfectly legal if you distribute the software with source code. That's a business decision which you or your manager or his/her manager... can make. Such questions (whether giving a copy to your Dutch branch is distribution) often don't have an answer that is yes or no but maybe - if you went to court, would a judge say that it is distribution? The answer is quite clearly "maybe". So unless you can find a safe way, there is a risk. Again, your lawyers will assess the risk.
The legal issues are too black and white to have any meaningful impact on an ethics discussion. The IP belongs to A and B can't use it. A's not planning to build a product around the patent is irrelevant to the law and I do not see it bring up any ethical issue, but some people who do not understand patent law might. There might be ethics issues if A hired Josh with the specific plan to fire him as soon as the application was filed and intentionally misled him about these plans. Another issue might be Josh's duty to not disclose A's confidential information (the application does not become public right away), and Josh's duty to not draw B into developing an infringing product.
It is entirely legal to discriminate on arbitrary grounds. What is not legal is to discriminate on the basis of a protected category, for example race. The law say that you cannot favor or disfavor a customer because of their race. Federal law specifically prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin, but not age or gender (disability is more complicated). Moreover, the grounds are not arbitrary. The establishment is at legal risk if a customer does not wear eye-protection, and you have no right to compel them to assume that risk: it's a perfectly normal business decision. The law states that "Customers are not allowed to use a tanning device unless the customer uses protective eyewear", and verifying that you have such eyewear is the minimal way of assuring compliance with the law.
You seem to assume that copyrights require paperwork such as registration. This is wrong, copyright is automatic. And it prevents the downloader from making the sort of change that you suggest. In fact, it prevents the downloader from using your template at all. The only reason the downloader can use that template is because you've granted him a specific license to ignore some copyright rules, but the default remains. And you did not grant the right to alter the template to free users.
The creator of the software doesn't provide any warranty. If you feel confident in the quality of the software, nothing stops you from providing a warranty. If the software doesn't meet your guarantees, you will have to pay out because you provided the warranty, depending on the terms. Not the creator of the software because they explicitly didn't provide any warranty. If that's what you want to do, go ahead. I wouldn't. You don't have to republish under the BSD license, which you wouldn't. You must attach the license terms, which clarifies the role of the original creators, and that they don't give a warranty. Doing this allows you to copy the software. It doesn't mean you can't provide a warranty.
You probably can. There are a few questions here. First, is the message protected by copyright? In general, it probably is, but there are many exceptions that might allow you to use it without permission. Unfortunately, these exceptions vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The exceptions tend to allow the use of small excerpts of a work for various sorts of purposes that don't undermine the copyright holder's ability to profit. That leads to the second question, which is why you are using that message. If you're including it in your source code so you can test whether a message generated at run time is in fact that message, that's one thing, and it's probably okay. On the other hand, if the owner of the copyright sells a database of all its message strings, and you're compiling a similar database that you also intend to sell, that's probably not okay. A third question concerns the Firefox license terms. It's entirely possible that they allow you explicitly to do what you're considering, in which case it doesn't matter what copyright law says about it. On the other hand, Firefox is open source software, and under some open source licenses, if you incorporate any of the source code in your own product, you are required to release your product's source code under the same license. If you're not already planning to do that, you should consider carefully whether including that error message would trigger that provision (if there is one) of Firefox's open source license.