Does CC-SA (Share-Alike) force me to provide a free version of the derivative? I'm currently working on a project that uses work covered by the CC-BY-SA license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ In the license, it states that I can: Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. And must: ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. My project itself can definitely be considered a derivative of the licensed work, or at least builds on it in a way that I'm happy to accept it needs to be shared under the same license as above. What I'm unsure of is: If I sell my derivative work, am I also required to share it for free? Or can I sell it how I like? I'm aware that no matter how I distribute my work; I would have no right to prevent anybody else redistributing it for free (or even make money from it themselves). But it's quite a different situation if I'm also required to provide it for free.
The price is not one of the terms and conditions of the CC-SA license. You may chose to attach a price to a derivative work (which you have the right to create under license section 3.b). But any person who receives the derivative work legitimately (from you or from someone who got it from you, directly or indirectly) must get it under the CC-SA license, and has the right to redistribute it, and may do so at no charge if that person so chooses. Also, you may not impose any copy protection or other technological measure that would prevent exercise of the reuser's rights. Whether selling a work that may be redistributed freely is good business is your decision.
Yes That is very simple - copyright is an exclusive right that starts automatically with the creation of a copyrightable work. The default situation is that the author has an exclusive rights to make copies of the work and derivative works. If the code is published somewhere by the author but the author has not said anything about its licence or copyrights, then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. They have the right to just publish it somewhere, others don't. If you try to contact the author and they don't say anything and ignore you, then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. If it's impossible to find the author (e.g. I have certain cases with literary works where it's not clear who inherited the rights after the author died), then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. That being said, certain forms of reuse (recreating ideas, learning from them, etc) would not be a copyright violation. But in general the situation with the author not saying anything is almost the same as the author explicitly stating "all rights reserved, you're not allowed to do anything, violators will be shot" - some specific uses are allowed even against author's wishes (e.g. 'fair use' clauses) but everything that needs their permission really does need their explicit permission.
The film you want to base your game on is probably covered by copyright and likely trademarks. For purposes of the question I'll assume it's not in the public domain (if the film was made before 1926 for example). If you used the film to create your game, it would be a derivative work. Derivative works require the consent of the copyright owner. Distributing it without their permission would leave you open to lawsuits for copyright infringement, unjust enrichment, and possibly others. Fair use/fair dealing likely doesn't apply here. This isn't criticism, parody, or a transformative use. You may be able to get away with this by flying under the radar if you don't distribute it for profit or on any large scale. Some studios are more litigious than others and some accept that leaving fan works alone is better than the bad publicity that comes with shutting them down. However, this is entirely reliant on the goodwill of the studio. The legal way to do this is to get in touch with the copyright holder and ask permission. This may be in return for something else- usually money, royalties, and/or some creative control over your work. This may not be feasible though as a large company may simply ignore such requests from random people. Note that a lack of a response in this case is not permission.
Copyright protection is about certain acts, and not about relationships between products. Copyright law says that the creator of an original work hold the exclusive right to copy and to authorize creation of derivative works. Copyright law does not say that anybody can freely create derivative works as long as they are different to a certain extent. So if you take an original Mario and modify it a teeny bit, that is a violation of copyright; if you take an original Mario and modify it hugely, that is a violation of copyright. Degree of similarity is relevant on some cases when the factual question arises whether the allegedly-infringing work is based on some protected original. This is most obvious in music cases, where all baroque music has some similarity to all other baroque music, all death metal has some similarity to all other death metal, and so on. There is not a legal quasi-statutory standard for measuring substantial similarity in music. The scientific underpinning of such a standard would be based on (weighted) combinatorics and the idea that there are only so many tunes possible (that would be a huge number, until you get to the "within a genre" condition). It seems obvious (by your "admission") that the derived works are based on protected works, so Nintendo's permission is required to legally create such works. However, you do or would hold copyright in your unauthorized derived work. Without a trail of evidence such as a SE question pointing to the connection, the derived images might be hard to connect to the originals. In addition, you may be able to avail yourself of a "fair use" defense, in case you get sued by the original creator. Factors favoring such a defense are the insubstantiality of the copying (a small portion) and the "transformativeness" of your creation.
You are required to provide a copyright notice on your work, such as putting (c) rhino 2016 in the liner notes. Nothing precludes you from licensing that copyright in any way you want, such as Creative Commons. As long as you aren't in violation of the last sentence (your work is not primarily the samples, and you actually made a song with them), then others should be able to use your work with no restrictions other than what you yourself place on the work. The purpose of requiring a copyright notice on derivative works is to give notice of who the actual author is and distance the original author from the derivative work. If you take their samples and make a song that is later at the center of a lawsuit (copyright, defamation, etc), the the copyright notice will hopefully steer people first to the derivative author and not the original author. That is the purpose of the clause in the copyright grant above.
See https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service and https://law.stackexchange.com/help/licensing. As with most social media sites, your contribution of content does not transfer ownership of any copyright in the content; rather, you grant to the platform a non-exclusive license. Because the license is not exclusive, you can grant similar or different licenses to other parties, which generally happens when you post the same content on other sites. (Of course, you can only grant licenses when you own the copyright or have a license that allows you to grant a further license, so posting content created by others can be complicated; this seems to be beyond the scope of the question, though, so I mention it only in passing.) To answer with respect to a specific site, of course, you have to look at the site's terms of service.
You are concerned that your application is somehow a derivative work of MariaDB and therefore subject to the GPL. It's not totally clear to me whether that is the case or not. But it doesn't matter, because you are not distributing MariaDB itself (or any other part of your application). You're running it on a server which users are connecting to remotely. From MariaDB's licensing FAQ: Internal usage is free The GPL license only affects code that you distribute to other parties. Internal usage within an organization is totally free and not subject to any conditions. There is no such thing as 'internal distribution' that would restrict the usage of your code by requiring it to be GPLed. Connecting to a remote service that runs MariaDB (or any other GPL software) in the background is also free. For internal programs for which you own all the copyright(s), there is essentially no risk in using GPL software. The argument you can use in your defense is that if the software became GPL as part of the distribution, you as the copyright holder could immediately revert your part back to its original copyright. No one has the right to require you to reveal or redistribute your code to the outside of your organization even if you would have distributed it internally linked with GPL software! If your lawyers are concerned about distributions of software linked with GPL libraries between different legal entities within your organization, you can solve this by distributing your components and the GPL software separately, and have your other entity combining them. You can also switch to use the new LGPL client libraries. The use you have described in your question clearly falls into this case, and the presence of this FAQ item clearly demonstrates that the MariaDB developers intended to allow you to do this. The Free Software Foundation (the people who wrote the GPL) agree with this position for both unmodified copies and derivative works. Technically, you don't need a license to &quot;use&quot; a piece of software at all, assuming you have lawfully obtained it. But you're concerned about the possibility of creating a derivative work, for which a license is required. Fortunately, the GPL doesn't care about derivative works so long as they are not distributed.
You can't You agreed: by submitting Materials in any form to the Company, in addition to other provisions of the Terms, you automatically grant Company a royalty-free, world-wide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and assignable right and license to use, copy, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, edit, translate, create derivative works from, transmit, distribute, publicly display and publicly perform such Materials for the purpose of displaying and promoting the Materials on any website operated by, and in any related marketing materials produced by, the Company and its affiliates. They can keep and use your data forever and give it to whoever they want. The clause you quote doesn't alter that. All it says is that once a year, if you ask, they will tell you what information they shared and with whom. If they feel like it they will tell you how to get the information deleted.