Who&#39;s liable for copyright infringement when hiring a design company? If company A pays company B to create an ad/logo/video/etc. and then uses it, what happens if company B used copyrighted material without obtaining the necessary permissions, unbeknown to company A? Is company A liable for that? I assume they wouldn't be able to use the material after being informed of the infringement and presented proof of that. I'm asking about if they don't know about it.
Yes, company A is liable for that; ignorance is not a defence. For this reason, a prudent company A would put an indemnification clause in their contract with company B so that if A is sues then company B pays. This is, of course, completely useless if company B is out of business at the time of the suit.
Is it legal to make a video compilation of websites that use our product for promotion of our company? [...] We would only be showing brief clips of client's products, strung together for a short video. This will most probably be both copyright violation and trademark infringement. Copyright is generally violated if you copy a creative work produced by someone else - which is what you want to do. Trademarks are generally violated when you use someone else's trademarks (such as their logo or company name) to promote your product - which, again is what you want to do. There are various exceptions available - copyright may not apply if the work is very simple, trademark use may be allowed e.g. in comparative advertising, etc., etc., but the rules for this are complex, unclear and very different in various jurisdictions. You could risk it and hope no one sues you (and maybe no one will), but the safe route is to ask permission first.
It Depends If the person reusing the image (lets call that person R for reuser) is not complying with the terms of the Creative commons license, which include a requirement to provide attribution of the source work, then R cannot rely on the license, and the granting of the license ad the presence of a license declaration is legally irrelevant. R must have some other basis to reuse the image. This could be an exception to copyright, such as fair use or fair dealing. Or possibly the image is not protected by copyright, for example because its copyright has expired, or because it is a work of the US Federal Government being used in the US. In the absence of such a basis, R is infringing copyright. In much of the world copyright now lasts for 70 years after the death of the author (or of all co-authors). In some different terms apply, ranging from life+50 to life+100. Sound recordings and photos get shorter terms in some countries. In the US the term is life+70 for recent works, but for work created and published before 1978 more complex rules apply, depending on the date of publication, and whether laws on notice and renewal were complied with. See the well-known chart Copyright Term and the Public Domain for the various cases and when copyright expires in each case. The question asks about fair use. This is a US-specific legal concept. It is designed to be flexible, an is highly fact-dependent. As a result it is rarely possible to say if a use will qualify as a fair use with certainty until a court passes on it. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? for more on fair use. Not providing attribution is itself often considered to weigh against fair use. The question does not give enough detail to make even a good guess as to whether such a use is likely to be held to be fair use. Identifying the kind of eagle has some educational value, which might favor fair use to some extent, but must be considered in light of the overall purpose of the use, which is not described. There is no indication as to whether the original work is creative or factual, or whether the reuse would be likely to harm the market for the original. Much use of images on social media does not stand up under a fair use analysis. Providing proper attribution might well help any fair use claim. See also Do you have to give attribution if an image falls under Creative Commons?
Making a profit does not make the act illegal: it is illegal without there being any profit. The act of copying without permission is what makes the act illegal. Profit might maybe enter into the matter if you are talking about the "fair use" defense, since certain kinds of works can be partially copied for certain purposes. You could quote a few lines from a novel in a review, for instance. The judgment of whether a given act of copying without permission is allowed under fair use is complex and involves a balancing act. Profit becomes relevant in that a non-profit use favors fair use and a for-profit use disfavors it. Wholesale copying of works of art as you describe is illegal (is infringement). However... "illegal" is a pretty broad concept. If you infringe on my intellectual property, you almost certainly will not suffer any consequences unless I sue you. Taking "illegal" to mean "in violation of the law", infringing copyright is illegal because it violates the law, but I have to make a federal case out of your infringement – I have to sue you. As it happens, it can also be a crime to infringe copyright, and in that case, the government and not the copyright holder pursues the matter. If a person knowingly infringes copyright, he might be prosecuted, thus the Megaupload case which in the US is realized in the indictment US v. Dotcom. Moreover, profit motive is a required element for criminal infringement. (Also note that you don't have to actually make a profit for the profit element to be present). You cannot sue a person unless they have harmed you, so if you know that Smith copied Jones' work you can't sue Smith for harming Jones. (This is what they call "standing"). You might sue Smith, but not for infringement itself. If they sold you an illegal infringing copy, then you could sue. Or, their infringement could diminish the value of your legal copy. This website gives a multi-nation overview of criminal copyright infringement laws.
There are now 2 works. An original, abandoned work, and a new, derivative work. The original creator owns the copyright over the original, and the new person owns copyright over the derivative he created. In your scenario, it will be the new creator, who will have the right to sue, if the gpl of the new work has been infringed
Hypothetically speaking, if a program doesn't come with a EULA, does that mean someone in possession of it (who isn't the owner) would be breaking the law if they used it? If the copy on the stick was lawfully made with permission of the copyright holder, then you can lawfully use the software. Someone who lawfully comes into possession of a lawfully made copy of the software (that was not a backup) has the right to use that software in the ordinary way. For example if someone found a USB stick lying on the ground and it had software on it but no EULA, could they use the software? Maybe, but it would be hard for them to know whether they could or not. It might be a backup. It might be an unlawful copy. There was a case where a person found a CD in the trash that was clearly an original. The package had a shrink wrap agreement, but he found the CD without the package. The court held that he had every right to use the software on the CD (since it was a lawfully-made copy and not a backup) and was not bound by the EULA (since he hadn't opened the package). But he was very fortunate in being able to demonstrate these facts.
To the best of my understanding: US copyright law does not have anything in particular to say about credits of this nature, for the most part. The law doesn't even say that you have to credit people at all. It just says you have to get a license (i.e. &quot;permission&quot;) to use the item in question. Even that is only required when the work is not a &quot;work made for hire&quot; (i.e. any work by an employee of the production company, within the scope of their job). There are some weird situations where the law does require a credit (e.g. a compulsory license acquired under 17 USC 115 requires the licensee to preserve metadata identifying the original song and artist), but this is the exception rather than the rule. The exact wording and ordering of film credits (and TV/other credits) is typically the product of extensive negotiations between all of the people credited, the production company, and (in most cases) their respective unions. It is thus subject to contract law rather than copyright law. Copyright licenses usually mandate some sort of credit be given, except for certain specialized types of work such as ghostwriting (where the whole point is that you don't get credited). Some licenses are more flexible on this point than others. For example, Creative Commons licenses set out a specific list of things that must be included, and mandate that it must appear alongside other credits if there are any, but other than that, you can basically word and display the credit in any way that is &quot;reasonable.&quot; However, one-off private licenses will likely be much more specific and restrictive about how the credit is displayed. Speculating: It may be the case that different attorneys drafted different licensing agreements with different credit phrasings wholly by accident, or for no particular reason, simply due to a lack of direct coordination. In other words, nobody was actively trying to make sure all the credits matched, so they didn't.
The fact that a developer is showing off work that he/she has done for other another company doesn't imply that that developer owns any copyright to the work. In Canada, see the Copyright Act, § 13 (3): Where the author of a work was in the employment of some other person under a contract of service or apprenticeship and the work was made in the course of his employment by that person, the person by whom the author was employed shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright and § 13 (4): The owner of the copyright in any work may assign the right... In the US, see 17 U.S.C. § 201 (b): In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright. and § 201 (d): The ownership of a copyright may be transferred... "What rights should and should not be attributed to the developer?" That is a business decision to be made on a case-by-case basis. Advice about the prudent balance of copyright between an employer/client and employee/contractor is legal advice. "Is it okay to use this projects as part of the developer's portfolio?" If the developer can link to public use of a product that he/she developed for a company, then the developer is not violating copyright by simply advertising that they worked on the product and linking to, without reproducing, the work. If the developer for whatever reason maintained copyright ownership in the code and other assets, it would not be copyright infringement to reproduce those as part of the portfolio. If the developer did not maintain copyright ownership in the code or assets, reproducing those may be copyright infringement, dependent on whether the copyright owner allowed the developer to reproduce those elements, or if the reproduction is fair use. There may be other laws or contracts implicated, though: non-disclosure agreements, trademark law, among others.