Usage of song snippets in a prototype app For a project at university I design and implement an android application. In this application, I would like to present the user snippets of famous songs which they should then recognize. The application will NEVER be published in a play store or similiar and will only be used by participants of my user study and my supervisors. Is it allowed to use songs, if I will not make any profit out of that?
Any use of the song snippets in your App can be copyright infringement (in the US), Fair Use (U.S. Copyright Office) not withstanding. Not distributing the App and/or using the App only in a limited group for the study, or not making money from the App doesn't usually matter when it comes to copyright infringement. Fair Use does have some educational exceptions; read the link above and see if your case may fit. But the final assessment of educational use would be made by a court if you were sued for infringement. If the use in your App doesn't fall under the education exception, you still probably run little risk of the copyright holders finding out if the App use is private and within a small group, but that's your choice to make. You can always Google the name of the music/recording company; most provide ways online to request licensing of samples, but the cost may be prohibitive, or permission may simply not be available for popular songs.
Exactly the same way it works over all other content There are no special classes of copyright, there’s just copyright. What a user of a service may do with copyright materials will be spelled out in the licence. If there is no licence, then they are left with fair use/fair dealing.
Such clauses are called "copyright assignment", "invention assignment", and/or "works for hire" clauses, partly depending on the clause's intent and wording. They're pretty common in employment contracts for software development and some creative positions. Frankly, the clauses don't actually do much, at least in the US -- copyright law already recognizes the concept of works made for hire (which belong to the employer), and claims too far beyond that are often rejected if they aren't obviously related to company business. With that said, your hypothetical programmer's painting is safe unless it depicts, say, the contents of an email from the CEO. :) Even if the clause technically entitles the employer to claim ownership, the employer has no legitimate interest in doing so. Likewise, that app created outside work is safe as long as it is created using no company resources and is unrelated to the employer's business. If the app is obviously related, that's where things get hairy.
"There is a free mp3 app from a friend who asked me to publish it in my account, which I didnt check properly." You violated Google's policies by uploading an App that you did not have full control over and/or was not developed by you. As well, the App possibly violated Google's policies in terms of violating licensing for code libraries that were included, had code included in the App that was malicious or violated privacy, or was otherwise not compliant with Google's terms. Google's policies are legal contracts which you agree to when you open an account. You reserve the right to end the contract by deleting your account. They reserve the right to end the contract when their policies are not followed. See https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy/ "This sudden termination comes as a shock and Google's decision seem very rude to me." You may think it is rude, but Google is fully within its rights to terminate your account because you violated their terms. It matters little that you did not get the previous warning emails from Google; you are responsible for monitoring the account email for policy updates. If you’ve reviewed the policy and feel this termination may have been in error, please reach out to our policy support team. Try that; you might attempt to explain that it was honest error on your side.
Ideas (methods of playing, game mechanics, strategy, goals) cannot be protected by copyright. But any part of a creative work can. So, no copying of drawings, patterns, images, sounds, or the element. I suppose copying the software code is not an issue here, but it can, obviously, also not be copied. And nothing in your game can look like someone's else trademark.
Do you have an explicit permission by the artist? Does the artist give a blanket permission to anyone which covers this kind of use of their work (a license)? If no, then you commit a copyright violation when you use their work for your blog. This applies to practically any country which signed the Berne convention which is almost everywhere in the world. Having no commercial interest is usually not an excuse to violate copyright. Regarding which jurisdiction applies when you, your website and the copyright holder are in different countries: I opened a new question about this.
What you are missing is that the original copyright holder can give permission to make derivative works with strings attached. There is no automatic right to derive something from a copyrighted work. Those strings could include constraints on what you create in the process of making the derivative work. Yes it is a string limiting what you can do with something you own, but you would have been warned in the license and had the choice to start from scratch. People do create work-alike software with no copyright strings using two teams and a &quot;clean room&quot; design process. It is a lot harder than modifying something another person has developed. Also, law and someone's understanding of morals need not be aligned at all. And, in patent law, just creating something all by yourself from scratch does not give you ownership. If someone else did it first and got a patent you can't make the item you might think you own. IP law is complex and looking for &quot;fundamentals&quot; may not get you anywhere.
The law itself wouldn't specify what origin of code can be retrieved and then executed. The terms of service of Google would be what would restrict you from doing this or not, including what consequences you would have if Google discovered this. I can say that as a developer, I have created assemblies in C#, sent them to a server and my application downloaded them and executed them. In my case the assemblies were compiled from script code that the user created themselves and so they knew this was happening. There is no law that dictates that a particular block of code must go through a vetting process by Google prior to running. A quick check of Google's terms of service say that they do not allow this kind of updates. Here is a quote: An app distributed via Google Play may not modify, replace, or update itself using any method other than Google Play’s update mechanism. Likewise, an app may not download executable code (e.g. dex, JAR, .so files) from a source other than Google Play. This restriction does not apply to code that runs in a virtual machine and has limited access to Android APIs (such as JavaScript in a webview or browser).