Does hosting, developer or user location determine which laws apply? Example scenario: I live in Switzerland and develop a software. I publish the source code (and maybe a binary executable file) on a server located in the USA. Let's also assume a user from another country downloads and uses this software. I wonder, which countries laws regarding different aspects (like license, copyright and liability) apply (especially for me as developer). Additional context: Switzerland does according to Art. 8, PrHG (Which sadly isn't available in English) not permit to &quot;transfer&quot; liability to the end-user (as far as I understand), as many open source licenses do. So could I become liable, if the software was provided from a server located in another country than Switzerland, which permits such &quot;transfer&quot; of liability? Potentially related: User data storage location - This question seems similar to me, which lets me assume that in the above example, the law of all three countries could theoretically apply to me (even if the laws are conflicting each other).
A plaintiff chooses where to sue, provided that the chosen court has jurisdiction. The laws of the court's jurisdiction will generally apply, although in some cases it will also look at the laws of another relvant jurisdiction. Therefore, the laws of the developer's location, the hosting location, or of any user's location might apply. Often a user agreement of a license will specify that disputes are to be determined under the laws of a particular jurisdiction. Such agreements are often given effect, but some courts disregard them in some circumstances. Crafting an agreement to limit exposure to other laws as much as possible is the kind of thing for which good legal advice is generally needed.
Am I correct to infer that content/data created by a US city have an open license (public domain if created by US city employees or open license if created by a contractor)? No. For example, Larimer County, Colorado created election administration software in-house rather than using an outside contractor to do so, and it would be lawful for it to license that software to other governments in a manner that helps recover its development costs. There is an issue over whether a city or state can copyright its municipal ordinances or statutes or regulations in a legally enforceable way when people have a legal duty to comply with them. Some courts have held that state statutes that are binding upon people can't be protected in that manner. Efforts of the West Corporation to protect its page numbering system that was widely used by courts to refer to public domain case opinions were mostly invalidated in litigation. An open question is that most municipal governments incorporate by reference in their ordinances Uniform Building Codes that are subject to private copyrights and are not terribly cheap to obtain copies of. Yet, every person doing construction work is bound to follow the enacted ordinance including the parts incorporated by reference.
Whenever there is a license to share things, the license creator wants the license to be widely used, but absolutely does not want slightly different licenses that could be used to trick people, or that just cause legal problems when used. Normal copyright law applies. And for the reasons above, the GPL license as an example allows you to copy the license verbatim but absolutely doesn’t allow you to make any modifications other than changing who is the person licensing a work. I would be curious what happens legally if someone licenses something with a sneakily modified copy of the GPL and then makes claims against a licensee who assumed it was the original GPL.
I'm assuming that you are not seeking to change the license, and so it will remain GPLv3. As long as you've built on the original software, that license still applies. You also need to keep the previous copyright notices, including the names of the original people. Assuming that, everything you're doing is legal, which is what's on topic here. There is some etiquette around forks (which is what you're doing), which would be on topic at the Open Source Stack Exchange. I'm puzzled by your desire to have a different license text. You can't change the license from GPLv3, so that has to stay the same. (If the original has GPLv3 "or, at your option, any later version", you can drop the any other version text if you like.)
The tricky bit from a GDPR standpoint is that the US has a law that says a US-based company must hand over data to US government agencies even if the data is stored outside the US. This is US specific and a case where the US government gives itself jurisdiction outside the US but the EU can't directly do anything against it (outside of international negotiations). As you noticed this means if you store data at a US data processor there is no real difference whether the data is physically stored in the US or the EU. So to avoid transferring EU consumer data to the US several steps are needed. First the servers have to be physically located in the EU and second the company needs to be non-US based, EU based seems the obvious choice. AFAIK constructions of a US-based company creating a fully owned EU-based subsidary are currently used to achieve the second part. Whether this is sufficient may have to be decided in court.
According to US law, the GPL is a license, not a contract. This means it is valid without consideration, it also means if you are in violation of the license, then you are committing copyright infringement, instead of being in breach of a contract. In Germany, the GPL is a contract. And that's fine, because German law doesn't require consideration for a contract to be valid. It's interesting in that the GPL license doesn't require you to state whether you agree to the license/contract or not. But if you don't agree to the contract then there is no contract, and you have no right to use the software.
What should he do use or not use digital currency on sundays? If I understand correctly, you are asking about a scenario where the parties agree that the governing law will be that of jurisdiction B notwithstanding that the contract, or the relevant part thereof, will be performed in jurisdiction A. If A and B were [in] different countries, the issue could depend on what (if any) international treaties binding both countries provide regarding a conflict of laws. Absent any realistic specifics (enasia and eukaria are not realistic), let's assume that A means the U.S. or is some jurisdiction in the U.S. The contractually chosen law (jurisdiction B) would apply unless doing so contravenes policy restrictions of the jurisdiction where the contract is performed (jurisdiction A). Those policy restrictions could be public policy, legislation, or legislative intent that can be inferred from jurisdiction A's laws. For instance, see Ticknor v. Choice Hotels Int'l, Inc., 265 F.3d 931, 937 (9th Cir. 2011): The law of the state chosen by the parties ... will be applied ... unless ... application of the law of the chosen state would be contrary to a fundamental policy of a state which has a materially greater interest than the chosen state[.] (citing Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws at § 187(b)). Note that discrepancies between A's law and B's law do not necessarily result in a material detriment to A's policy, and it is unclear from your post whether refraining from using digital currency on Sundays would be such case. One would need to ascertain A's public policy and/or legislative intent (if the relevant legislation has been enacted).
Each country has its own copyright law, but the majority of countries have signed the Berne Copyright Convention, and most of those that have not, have joined the TRIPS agreement, which includes most of the same provisions. See Wikipedia for a list of those countries that do not adhere to Berne. Bangladesh is not on the list. The Berne Copyright Convention specifies the basics of copyright protection, requires a minimum term of protection, requires that copyright be granted without any formalities such as a copyright notice or registration, and requires that authors from other signatory countries be given at least as much protection as authors from the current country. It leaves many details to local law, however, including what exceptions to copyright are allowed. However, the Berne Convention does not require that buying a work that infringes copyright be treated as infringement, and I do not know of any country where it is, although I do not know the details of copyright law in Bangladesh In the united-states the copyright owner has the right to make or authorize the making of copies and to distribute or authorize the distribution of such copies. But once an authorized copy has been sold, the owner of the copy may re-sell it, lend it, or give it away to anyone, and no permission from the copyright owner is required. In the US this is called the &quot;First Sale Doctrine&quot;. The laws of many other countries, including the EU countries and the UK, are similar in this regard. That means that it is perfectly legal to take lawfully created and purchased copies into another country and resell them there. Moreover, if someone makes a copy without permission, or knowingly distributes such a copy, that person commits copyright infringement, and could in theory be sued, but the buyer does not. It should be noted that under US law the First Sale Doctrine does not apply to unauthorized (pirated) copies. It is copyright infringement to knowingly sell (but not to buy) unauthorized copies under US law, and it is an infringement to re-sell such copies if the seller knows that they are unauthorized, although at a private sale this is not likely to be enforced. The Copyright law of Bangladesh is somewhat different. Section 71 (in chapter 13) provides that infringement occurs: (a) when any person, without a license ... or in contravention of the conditions of a license ... (a)(i) does anything, the exclusive right to do which is by this Act conferred upon the owner of the copyright; ... (b) When any person- (b)(i) makes for sale or hire, or sells or lets for hire, or by way of trade displays or offers for sale or hire, or (b)(iv) imports into Bangladesh, any infringing copies of the work. The &quot;exclusive rights&quot; are given in section 14(1) of the same act (part of chapter 3) The relevant ones are: (a) to reproduce the work in any material form including the storing of it in any medium by electronic means; (b) to issue copies of the work to the public except copies already in circulation; At the end of section 14, it is noted that: For the purposes of this section, the copy which has been sold once shall be deemed to be a copy already in circulation. This seems to be the Bangladesh version of the First Sale Doctrine, and it does not, at least not explicitly, contain the same rule as US law does, that to see or rent an unauthorized copy is infringement, even if there was a previous sale. But such a rule may have been imposed by caselaw. So a copy of a book (or any other protected work) purchased in Bangladesh might or might not have been properly authorized, but the purchaser is not committing infringement in either case. Section 74 of the Bangladesh copyright act does provide that ⎯(1) The Registrar, [may] ... order that copies made out of Bangladesh of the work which if made in Bangladesh would infringe copyright shall not be imported. (2) ... the Registrar or any person authorized by him in this behalf may enter into any air-craft, ship, vehicle, dock or premises where any such copies ... may be found and may examine such copies. (3) All copies to which any order made under sub-section (1) applies shall be deemed to be goods of which the bringing into Bangladesh has been prohibited or restricted under section 16 of the Customs Act, 1969, (Act IV of 1969) and all the provisions of said Act shall have effect accordingly This appears to permit the seizure of improperly imported copies, but not prosecution of a purchaser of such copies. Whether it would be likely to be enforced in the case of copies sold in a street market I could not guess. Moreover, it is unlikely that a publisher will find it worth its while to sue a street market seller, even if that person sells a clearly pirated copy of a book, particularly in a foreign country (foreign to the publisher, that is). The publisher or copyright owner probably could sue, depending on the details of the law in the country where the sale occurs. But the suit would have to be brought in the courts of that country, and might well cost more to bring than any plausible damage award would yield. Still some copyright owners might sue if they learn of such a sale. But the buyer is not at risk unless the law in the country where the sale takes place is different from that of most countries in this matter.