What licensing issues are relevant when writing software using methods from research papers? I am writing some software that uses methods described in a few papers. The paper describes algorithms in terms of mathematical functions and equations. An example is, for instance, this one). The paper itself doesn't contain any source code - that is my own creation. Where can licensing terms for the papers be found? What rights are implied when there is no reference to a license? What do I need to be aware of as I convert the algorithms described in the paper into a software package?
Copyright doesn't protect methods, only particular fixed expressions. 17 USC 102 Some methods (but not algorithms) may be protected by patent. Diamond v. Diehr 450 U.S. 175 (1981) More exactly, "an algorithm, or mathematical formula, is like a law of nature, which cannot be the subject of a patent". However, in Diamond, the respondents here do not seek to patent a mathematical formula. Instead, they seek patent protection for a process of curing synthetic rubber. Their process admittedly employs a well-known mathematical equation, but they do not seek to preempt the use of that equation. Rather, they seek only to foreclose from others the use of that equation in conjunction with all of the other steps in their claimed process. Said another way: the algorithm cannot be protected, but if you are using the algorithm as part of a method or process that as a whole is patented, you would be infringing the patent. The paper does not have to disclose the patent - you could email the authors to see if they have any patent that protects any particular methods using the algorithm in the paper, but that doesn't rule out patents that the paper author is unaware of.
You cannot safely rely on the US doctrine of Fair Use, except if the rights-holder sues you in US courts. In France, there are limited exceptions to the authors proprietary rights. Under Art. L-122-5, there are some relevant potential exceptions: 3ºa) analyses and short quotations justified by the critical, polemic, educational, scientific or informatory nature of the work in which they are incorporated... 4º. parody, pastiche and caricature, observing the rules of the genre. Your description of the intended use does not fit these criteria. Consulting with a copyright attorney is advised, if you don't want to obtain a license.
The MIT License (as distributed by OSI) does not include an attribution requirement beyond the requirement to include the copyright notice in any re-distributed copy including derivative works. The same is true of the description of the license as described in the Wikipedia article. If you sent back to the maintainer a modified version including your own contributions with an MIT license notice and your name in the copyright statement, that is a new work released under that license. The maintainer (or anyone else) may not lawfully use your work or incorporate it into a new derived work without complying with the license terms, which require retaining the copyright notice. By distributing the combined work using a copyright notice not including your name, it would seem that your license is being violated. You could contact the maintainer with a request that your name be included in the notice or your contributions be removed. If that is not accepted, you could use a take-down notice, or file suit. That last would involve significant costs, of course.
If you create a new work that is derived from or based on someone else's work, it is a derivative work, and you cannot do so without permission from the original copyright holder. If the original work is made available under a CC-BY_SA 4.0 license, you have permission, but it comes with conditions. One of those is that you must attribute the original work -- you must say what work yours is based on and who created it. Another is that you must license your own derived work under the same CC-BY-SA license (or a compatible one). This does not mean that your work is not copyrighted -- it is. But it does mean that you must grant to others the same rights that the creator of the work you used granted to you. That is what the "share alike" or SA part of the license means. if you don't like that, you should not use a work licensed under CC-BY-SA terms to create your own work. If you publish your work but fail to grant that license to others, you are infringing the copyright of the work you used, and could be sued. Note that if you had created a compilation rather than a derived work -- for example if you created an album of images from various sources, some of them under CC-BY-SA licenses, you would retain a copyright on the collection as a whole, and that would not have to be under CC-BY-SA. But in this case you say that you used the other person's image as a background for your own illustration. That is creating an "adapted" or derivative work, i am fairly sure, and invokes the share alike clause of the license. You might also want to consider the different case mentioned in If I include an unmodified CC-BY-SA work in a book, does the whole book have to be CC-BY-SA?
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.
You Own The Code To answer your question on whether or not it is copyright infringement: Yes, you do own the rights to the written code but posting it on Github gives Github the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it. To simply put it, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features. This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive your Content. So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward. Things aren’t quite as clear-cut in a scenario where Copilot is trained on code that is hosted outside of GitHub. In that situation, the copyright infringement question would hinge largely on the concept of fair use. If Copilot is being trained on code outside of GitHub, we accept that at least some of what they’re looking at is copyrightable work. So, the question then becomes if it’s fair use. Now, you ultimately can’t conclude definitively that something is fair use until you go to court and a judge agrees with your assessment. But I think there’s a strong case to be made that Copilot’s use of code is very transformative, a point which would favor the fair use argument. There is precedent for this sort of situation. Take the case of Google Books, for example. Google scanned millions of books, provided people who were doing research with the ability to search the book, and provided the user a small snippet of the text that the user was searching for in the book itself. The court did in fact find that was fair use. The use was very transformative. It allowed people to search millions of books. It didn’t substitute for the book itself. It didn’t really take away anything from the copyright holders; in fact, it made it easier for readers to access the work and actually opened a broader market for book authors. And, it was a huge value add on top of the copyrighted corpus. In the latter scenario, a lot depends on the thoroughness and the length of Copilot’s suggestions. The more complex and lengthy the suggestion, the more likely it has some sort of copyrightable expression. If a suggestion is short enough, the fact that it repeats something in someone else’s code may not make it copyrightable expression. There’s also the question of whether what’s being produced is actually a copy of what’s in the corpus. That’s a little unclear right now. GitHub reports that Copilot is mostly producing brand-new material, only regurgitating copies of learned code 0.1% of the time. But, we have seen certain examples online of the suggestions and those suggestions include fairly large amounts of code and code that clearly is being copied because it even includes comments from the original source code.
Aren't computer programs mathematical equations? Any program can be represented mathematically. . . . But how are programs different from mathematical equations? . . . Don't encryption algorithms precisely come under the definition of mathematical equations? In the context of patent law, the "mathematical equations" that aren't patentable are those that are discovered and are mathematical laws of Nature. For example, you cannot patent a mathematical equation which is the equivalent of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (which tells you how many solutions there are to all possible polynomial equations), because it is a statement about what is fundamentally true about something, not about how to do something that works better than other possible ways of doing something. An algorithm, in contrast, in patent law, is a method of doing something that is not inherently the only way of doing something as a consequence of the laws of mathematics or other laws of Nature (although it could very well be the "best" way of doing something). For example, the simplex method of linear programming would probably be patentable if it hadn't been publicly disclosed prior to anyone obtaining a patent on this method. Most computer programs are the digital embodiment of algorithms, rather than of equations that were discovered that represent fundamental truths that are always and uniquely true about numbers or reality. Notably, recent governing U.S. Supreme Court case law has now made it categorically true that there mere fact of embodying an algorithm or other business method in digital form with a computer program, as a matter of law, does not make an idea that would not be patentable if not embodied in a computer program patentable. The underlying idea that is embodied digitally in a computer program must, itself, be patentable. A method for doing something, even if it can be or is represented mathematically, is not inherently not subject to being patented. But, not every method of doing something is patentable either. The "business method" must still clear the hurdles of being original (you can't patent ideas that have already been disclosed publicly by someone else, or by yourself for that matter), of having "utility" rather than merely aesthetic value, and of not being obvious to a person of ordinary skill if the field in which the invention arises. For example, anything that would follow as a lemma or corollary of an existing aspect of prior art would not be eligible for a patent either, even if it is novel and useful. Now, there is some room for sophistry here. For example, you could call a computer equation that calculated a Lorentz transform a method for calculating the relationship between two coordinate frames to which relativistic mechanics apply. But, because that relationship is a law of Nature which is always true, even if it isn't the only means to calculating that relationship, it would not be patentable even if it were not prior art. I want to start a company that uses machine learning algorithms. While it is a risky business model, it is worth considering that over the last 10-15 years the legal threshold necessary to patent a computer program has gotten much, much higher. The Patent and Trademark Office used to routinely grant these applications, but due to a string of important statutory and case law changes, software patents are now denied at a very high rate, and existing software patents are routinely determined to be invalid in litigation. If there is serious reason to doubt that an existing patent that would be important for your business is really patentable, you should consult a patent lawyer to consider the possibility of bringing an interpartes review action in the Patent and Trademark Office to have a previously issued patent revoked. This is an expensive and time consuming process, but it is much cheaper than losing a patent infringement lawsuit after having invested time and money into running a business using a patent you know to be infringing because you believe that it won't hold up in court.
Yes, commercial use is allowed for the AGPLv3 license. You can charge for your use of the software so long as you provide a way for the public to download the source code in its entirety.