Trademarking a product that contains a library licensed under Apache 2.0 I have a web application that makes use of the well known Twitter Bootstrap library which is released under Apache License 2.0 with Creative Commons CC-BY 3.0. Can I trademark this application? Note: I am trying to make sense of the Trademark notice under the Forbidden section on http://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/
You cannot use the libraries trademarks, but that does not stop you from using your own. For example, you cannot use the name Twitter Bootstrap to endorse, promote or use as the name of your project.
This is a case of nominative use. In general, it is fine to use trademarks to refer to the products trademarked, provided that a reasonable person would not be confused about who creates or provides the product, and would not think that the trademark holder has endorsed, authorized, or sponsored the book or other product that refers to the trademark. It is common to include a disclaimer stating that trademarks are owned by specific parities, and the author or publisher is not claiming them, nor claiming any endorsement or affiliation. Such a disclaimer makes the nominative function of the trade mark use clearer, and would make it harder for the trademark owner to prevail in an infringement suit. See This law.se question and answer for more info.
You Own The Code To answer your question on whether or not it is copyright infringement: Yes, you do own the rights to the written code but posting it on Github gives Github the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it. To simply put it, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features. This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive your Content. So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward. Things aren’t quite as clear-cut in a scenario where Copilot is trained on code that is hosted outside of GitHub. In that situation, the copyright infringement question would hinge largely on the concept of fair use. If Copilot is being trained on code outside of GitHub, we accept that at least some of what they’re looking at is copyrightable work. So, the question then becomes if it’s fair use. Now, you ultimately can’t conclude definitively that something is fair use until you go to court and a judge agrees with your assessment. But I think there’s a strong case to be made that Copilot’s use of code is very transformative, a point which would favor the fair use argument. There is precedent for this sort of situation. Take the case of Google Books, for example. Google scanned millions of books, provided people who were doing research with the ability to search the book, and provided the user a small snippet of the text that the user was searching for in the book itself. The court did in fact find that was fair use. The use was very transformative. It allowed people to search millions of books. It didn’t substitute for the book itself. It didn’t really take away anything from the copyright holders; in fact, it made it easier for readers to access the work and actually opened a broader market for book authors. And, it was a huge value add on top of the copyrighted corpus. In the latter scenario, a lot depends on the thoroughness and the length of Copilot’s suggestions. The more complex and lengthy the suggestion, the more likely it has some sort of copyrightable expression. If a suggestion is short enough, the fact that it repeats something in someone else’s code may not make it copyrightable expression. There’s also the question of whether what’s being produced is actually a copy of what’s in the corpus. That’s a little unclear right now. GitHub reports that Copilot is mostly producing brand-new material, only regurgitating copies of learned code 0.1% of the time. But, we have seen certain examples online of the suggestions and those suggestions include fairly large amounts of code and code that clearly is being copied because it even includes comments from the original source code.
No. The Creative Commons license seeks to promote recognition of the original author's work through attribution, but does not provide the same framework for enforcement that the DMCA would. The proper approach in cases such as the deleted Wikipedia article and subsequent reuse would be to provide a courteous notice to Wikipedia of your original publication and ask to be listed as the original author or be provided attribution. In the absence of relief there, then what rights you have would be determined by the Wikipedia Terms of Service. Since, and I am assuming here, that you are not generating billions of dollars on the original publication in royalties, seeking to bring a DMCA type enforcement on a Wikipedia article dispute would be like trying to swat a fly with a sledgehammer. (or more commonly in divorce, two people having hearing and spending thousands of dollars on attorney's fees fighting over a blender -- they are free to do it, but they would have been much better off buying 500 new blenders...) Keeping perspective and providing a courteous letter is probably your most cost efficient first step in situations like this. And in all areas of law, just remember, you catch more flies with honey than you do with salt. (meaning taking the courteous approach usually affords better results than a scalding letter breathing hell-fire and brimstone) In followup to earlier comment: Presuming you would be covered by the World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty on Copyright of 1996 (as a U.S. Citizen you would be), and your copyright is on file with the United States Copyright Offices (same presumption) as prerequisite to suit, then there is nothing that prevents you from invoking the protections under general copyright law and under the DMCA (inlcuding the Takedown provisions). Note: these are not the only prerequisites to taking action, but instead the minimum critera to qualify, and note this does not pass on the wisdom of doing so (there are often significant consequences to improperly invoking previsions of certain acts).
All of your works would be considered to be a derivative work. This is because your work, is based on the work of someone else's. A good test for this to see if something is a derivative work is to see whether the new work can effectively exist without the original. Most copyright laws worldwide are similar, thanks to the Berne Convention for copyrighted works. Since derivative works are normally a right that is exclusive to the copyright holder, you can't make such works without permission (generally through a license or expiry of copyright). So now, let's take a look: The Mona Lisa was made hundreds of years ago. It's definitely in the public domain. You're in no breach of copyright laws here. Yes, of course. Microsoft retains copyright on their icons, and possibly trademarks as well. However, they may have trademark guidance that allows you to use their icons - as long as you follow it. Likely the same as microsoft - you can assume it's similar for most large companies. Code is copyrighted as a literary work - the layout and visual aspect is copyrighted as an artistic work. That artist retains copyright, unless you obtain the work with a license, or the copyright is expired. If you create a derivative work, you infringe on their rights.
There isn't a meaningful difference; they just renamed it for version 2.0. Comparing CC-BY-ND-NC 1.0 and CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 side-by-side, one can easily see that their scope is the same--there is some rewording, but that rewording is common to all CC-1.0 vs. CC-2.0 licenses, and not indicative of any change in the fundamental scope or purpose of CC-BY-ND-NC vs. CC-BY-NC-ND.
Ok here is my go at answering my own question: (see comments above &amp; below for links) Depending on what you want to do, GPL can be a bit complicated, with multiple versions, version numbers, and added exceptions over the years. it can be a headache. However, for this purposes of app development incorporating GPL/LGPL libraries, it is fairly straightforward. Keep in mind to check version numbers on all relevant documents, although they are most likely v3.0. As far as I know linking to a GPL library binds you to also releasing your code under GPL. So that is a no-go for closed source, but that brings me to my 1st question. is it legal for me to remain closed source while incorporating external libs that are both BSD and LGPL? and I think the answer to that is yes provided that I dynamically link to said component (.so .dll .dylib .framework). Permission of this is granted under section 4d of LGPL v3.0. d) Do one of the following: 0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source. 1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version. My 2nd question Would it change the ability for me to stay closed source if i were to use an altered version of one of these libraries? It is my interpretation that in this case the only source you would need to provide is that of the modified library, and that the application itself can remain closed source. I'm basing this on grounds that nothing has changed from the situation for my 1st question other than the fact that the modified component library is now a derivative work under standard GPL v3.0. finally my 3rd question what is the legal effect on static vs dynamic linking? This seams to be a bit iffy. Again see section 4d of the LGPL v3.0. By this wording dynamic linking is much preferable, and there are basically no requirements. If you choose to link statically though(in other words as part of the project build) things get complicated. To fully understand see LGPL definition of "Corresponding Application Code", and then see sections 4 5 and 6 of the GPL document. Full source is not required, but as far as i can tell you are required to provide all necessary materials for someone to build the project from scratch, so they can use a different version of the library if they so choose. This, in my opinion, would not be closed source. I hope that is clear enough? I did quite a bit of looking around the internet in coming up with this answer, and in the end even some reading of the license, though I'm not sure I've actually read them through in there entirety. Keep in mind that there are multiple version of each license, and you should check version numbers for each LGPL library you use. There is a lot of good information on on opensource.stackexchange, although much more than one can process in a single sitting, and with occasional disagreement on finer points. Below are some related links. gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.txt copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/2bsd/license.txt opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1700/are-derivative-works-a-subset... opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2772/can-this-nvidia-licence-be-us... opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2488/do-i-need-to-host-qt-source-w... opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/are-there-examples-of-proprie... opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5162/are-the-terms-of-lgpl-3-0-alr...
We can't really know until the ruling is made. The Supreme Court might issue a ruling that encompasses all software APIs, or may predicate its ruling on this more specific situation, e.g. that because Oracle's library is so extensive its structure can be copyrighted even if that does not necessarily mean that any individual function signature can be copyrighted. They could also decide based on something unrelated to the heart of the copyright question - skimming through the petition for a writ of certiorari, they could make a decision based on the original implied license from Sun, for example. Hopefully their decision will answer the copyright question of function declarations completely, but it isn't required to.