MIT and GPL-3.0 conflicting licence I am creating a project for myself based off of two different GitHub projects. Code from each of the two projects are used in my project, and I am planning on releasing it to the public. The conflict I face is that the two original GitHub projects my project is based off of each have differing licences. One has the MIT licence, and the other has the GPL-3.0 licence. Both of these licences require that any resulting code from those projects are released under the same licence. Therefore, what licence should my new project be released under, or do I have a choice to choose whichever I want? Thanks
You have misunderstood the MIT license. The MIT license requires you to include a copy of &quot;the above copyright notice and this permission notice&quot; in &quot;all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot; However, this is not the same as requiring you to offer the Software under those terms, and in fact the MIT license explicitly permits you to sublicense the Software under different terms (&quot;including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&quot;). If you had to offer the Software under the same terms, then the sublicense right would be extinguished, so that cannot be the correct reading of the license. Therefore, you can do exactly what you describe, releasing the software under the GPL. In other words, you have to include the permission notice, but you are expressly permitted to wrap it in terms that state &quot;these permissions don't apply to you, dear end user, but only to people who go and download the original from the upstream source.&quot; That's what &quot;sublicense&quot; means. The Free Software Foundation, which publishes the GPL, agrees with this analysis (although they recommend avoiding the phrase &quot;MIT License&quot; because MIT has offered software under other licenses).
The reason is 17 USC 106: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following... (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work The original picture is the underlying protected work. The ASCII reproduction is a derivative work. If you get permission to make the derivative work, it is okay. Otherwise, it is copyright infringement. There is an escape clause, "fair use", which amounts to taking a chance that you won't be sued and then arguing that you didn't do them any prohibited harm. If you make any money off of the game, you have a major strike against you. I suggest reading the fair use FAQ; basically, it is really hard to know how a fair use defense will fare, but based on prior cases, I'd say it's infringement, not fair use.
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.
Yes, you did something wrong; you used both the university's trade mark and copyright without their permission. I don't know the law in India, however, if it is similar to Australia it is unlikely that the police will be interested in doing anything about it. While it is technically a crime, criminal prosecution is usually reserved for egregious breaches on a for profit basis. I suggest you apologise and agree to stop distributing your app.
This can't be right. If I modify open source code as part of the work done, by nature of the open source license that code can not become intellectual property of the client. Certainly it can. That which is "developed or produced" would be the modifications to the pre-existing code, i.e the copyright on the derivative work so created. If the base code was under a share-alike or copy-left license, then the client can only distribute it under the same license (or a compatible one, perhaps). But nothing compels the client to distribute it, and for the client's use, the client owns the copyright, without fear of any future claims by the contractor. If I have my own code/scripts/settings/templates/etc that I use as a contractor, and I modify those in the interest of coding efficiency in the interest of serving the client, it hardly seems correct that these assets become property of the Client. Those are your work, and you can choose whether to sell the copyrights to the client or not. Again, only the work done for that client would be covered under the wording quoted above, unless there is another provision that grants the client a license to use the pre-existing work which you modified for the job, which there probably ought to be. Or I suppose the agreement could assign copyrights in pre-existing work to the client, but that seems an odd choice, and the language in the question would not do that. You and the client could agree on a different provision such as: The contractor grants to the client a fully-paid, non-exclusive permanent license to use all intellectual property developed under this agreement, and any pre-existing works that may be incorporated therein. The contractor warrants that s/he is entitled to grant such license, without infringing on the intellectual property of any other person or entity. That wording would have the contractor retain all copyrights and other IP, but provide a license to the client to use it without further payment or expiration. Many other ways to structure such a provision are possible, dividing the rights up however the contractor and client can agree. The price for the work might vary depending on what rights the client obtains. Both forms, and many others, are perfectly legal, it is just a question of what the contractor chooses to sell, and what th4e client chooses to buy.
united-states The license won't let you sell the .stl file. Probably you have created a derivative work, which means you can't sell it without a copyright license (and the CC-A-NC won't do). If it were licensed under CC-A you could sell it without problems (you'd have to give attribution, of course). You could also sell it under the CC-A-SA, but once you do you have no control over the result -- anyone you sold it to could give it to someone else under the terms of the license. This could work, though, if it were (say) a commission and you only expected to sell one copy. I don't know what the situation would be with the physical objects printed under any of these licenses.
It doesn't work like that! If the code is not properly licensed, you can not acquire a license for it. If you don't have a license, you can not use it. Usage without a license is copyright infringement and not allowed: the copyright is with the author, and only the author may make derivates or copies or allow them to be made by licensing it. You do not gain copyright by fixing a licensing error - in fact, you commit copyright infringement if you do not have a license, and providing wrong copyright management information is illegal under 17 USC 1202
Since licensing can only be done by the copyright holder, you generally need individual permission from each copyright holder to change the license of their code. (If the project is being re-licensed to the GPL from a compatible license, then no re-licensing from the copyright holder is necessary; however, versions 2 and 3 of the GPL are not compatible with one another.) Ways around this are: Remove or replace all code written by the unreachable contributors. Have contributors assign copyright to a person or legal entity that controls the project, so that there is exactly one copyright holder. (This is a preventive measure. If you have not done this already, it's too late when you cannot track down a contributor.) But if you can't do either of those things, what do you do? Historically, re-licensing of software without explicit approval from all contributors has been done before, under the advice of legal professionals. However, the legal mechanics of it are unclear and have never been tested in court. The two prominent examples appear to be: Mozilla relicensed from the MPL to a triple-licensed MPL/GPL/LGPL scheme The Dolphin emulator relicensed from GPLv2 to GPLv2+. The Dolphin project produced a report about the process, but it lacks any specifics about how the legal mechanics of the switch work. They say (emphasis mine): Out of all [200 contributors], we managed to contact all or take care of the code of all but 10 of those developers. Considering that many of those accounts are now dead and the people seemingly vanished from the Internet, finding the rest is akin to squeezing blood out of a stone. That's when research provided us some much needed relief when it seemed as though relicensing was an impossibility. In 2003, Free Software lawyers consulted for Mozilla's relicensing project and stated that relicensing with the permission of just 95% of contributors was fine, as long as there were no objections in the remaining 5%. [...] [...] Instead of simply asking all of our active developers and relicensing, we made a very strong effort to get a hold of every single developer. Despite this, it simply wasn't feasible to make contact with every single person who worked on Dolphin. [...] We definitely would love to hear support from those that we were unable to contact, and if there are any concerns we will gladly address them in a prompt fashion. That posts links to a post from Ciaran O'Riordan: Someone who works with many lawyers on free software copyright issues later told me that it is not necessary to get permission from 100% of the copyright holders. It would suffice if there was permission from the copyright holders of 95% of the source code and no objections from the holders of the other 5%. This, I’m told, is how Mozilla was able to relicense to the GPL in 2003 despite years of community contributions. There is no information available about why Mozilla's lawyers believed it was acceptable to re-license without each copyright holder's permission. It's also unclear if any factors apply to Mozilla specifically that might apply less strongly to anyone else in a similar situation. In sum, we know only that: You need the permission of every contributing copyright holder to re-license a work Mozilla's lawyers believed (for unspecified reasons) it would be acceptable for Mozilla to make a good-faith effort to contract all contributors and then re-license, even if 5% of the contributors were unreachable (and none of the contributors disapproved).