If no open source license is given on a github account, what rules apply? The GitHub help pages says that You're under no obligation to choose a license. It's your right not to include one with your code or project, but please be aware of the implications. Generally speaking, the absence of a license means that the default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. This might not be what you intend. Even if this is what you intend, if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, you allow others to view and fork your repository. Would a forked repository be able to be used to produce something commercially?
I'll quote from my answer on a similar question from Programmers.SE: ...[T]he Github TOS have this to say about material hosted on their site: By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories. Hosting on Github means that the author grants others the right to &quot;view&quot; and to &quot;fork&quot; the repository. Here, &quot;fork&quot; probably just means &quot;use Github's fork feature&quot;, which creates a repository clone, hosted on Github. GitHub's use of &quot;fork&quot; here probably refers to the software feature of the website github.com called &quot;Fork,&quot; which allows users to create a verbatim copy of a repository on github.com. The TOS do not require the author to grant any other specific rights, like the right to prepare derivative works or to redistribute copies of the work, so &quot;fork&quot; here probably is not used the general sense of &quot;produce a derivative work.&quot; Thus, the code's presence on GitHub does not grant you rights to reuse the work in ways protected by copyright (commercial or otherwise) without a explicit license from the author.
You need to check what license the library comes with. The fact that you want to create a public domain program doesn't give you any rights to any library. So read the BSD license and see what it tells you whether and how you can use the library. For example, if you used a GPL-licensed library, you could not put your program in the public domain legally.
Their code, their rules A copyright holder is free to offer their work under none, one or many licences. They can, at the same time, use their own work however they see fit without regard to the licences they have given/sold to others (except, they can only give one person an exclusive licence). As an analogy, let’s say I own a fleet of cars. I can drive my cars anytime I want. I can let Jim drive my cars anytime he wants for free. I can let Mary drive a specific car on Thursdays and only within 10km of the depot. I can let Joe drive my cars providing he pays me $50 a day. And I’m not going to let Fred drive them at all because Fred’s a jerk. Each of those is a different licence.
Whenever there is a license to share things, the license creator wants the license to be widely used, but absolutely does not want slightly different licenses that could be used to trick people, or that just cause legal problems when used. Normal copyright law applies. And for the reasons above, the GPL license as an example allows you to copy the license verbatim but absolutely doesn’t allow you to make any modifications other than changing who is the person licensing a work. I would be curious what happens legally if someone licenses something with a sneakily modified copy of the GPL and then makes claims against a licensee who assumed it was the original GPL.
One cannot use the works of others unless one of the following applies: The copyright holder has given permission, usually in the form of a license, often explicit, but sometimes implied. The work is not protected by copyright. This can happen in several ways, but the most common is that the work is old enough that copyright has expired. In the US, works older than 1927 are currently out of copyright. So are some others, the rules are a bit complex. In many countries, if the author or creator died more than 70 years ago, the work is out of copyright. In some countries this is a different number, between 50 and 100 years. This is not likely to apply to a file distributed with current software. If an exception to copyright applies. In the US this would most likely be fair use. In the UK it would probably be fair dealing. In other countries there are a variety of exceptions that might apply, including personal use in some. AS a comment by Jen points out &quot;use&quot; here refers only to those rights protected by copyright, such as making and distributing copied, making nd distributing derivative works, and the like. (Displaying and publicly performing seem unlikely to apply.) Now lets consider the specific situation, and which if any of the reasons for lawful use might apply. License or other permission. There is no explicit license. Since the program is distributed to be run, there is an implicit license to make the sort of use of the file needed to run the program. If the documentation describes how to employ the file as part of running the program, there is almost surely an implied license to employ it in that way. There is not, however, permission to make copies unless that is needed to run the program. There is surely not permission to make derivative works of the file or distribute copies to others, even if you do not charge anything. Expired copyright This pretty clearly will not apply. Fair use This might apply, or might not. There isn't enough info in the question to tell, not even to make a good guess. If any use would be non commercial, that helps fair use a bit. If the use would be for a different purpose than the one the developers used it for, that helps fair use a lot. If the use of the file harmed the market for the program, or served as a substitute, that lean against fair use. without knowing what the file is, what it does, and how it might be used, one really cannot weven guess.
To answer the question in your title: Yes, software licenses are copyrighted. They are written works that involve (significant, expert) creative effort to create. The best solution would be for Grammarly to hire a lawyer and say "we want a new EULA. We think this one covers a number of points our current one doesn't". Most legal documents will be copyright for the same reason (there may be a few that are so stereotypical that there is essentially no creative effort in putting them together).
First off: Legally, everything is copyrighted anyway. Licensing is not at all necessary. Hence, even if a court would disagree with # SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0, that would just make it closed source. Having said that, the law generally doesn't bother with trivialities such as &quot;file headers&quot;. Any commonly accepted way to state the copyright and license terms is OK. Your LICENSE is such a common convention. If you want to avoid all doubt what is covered under that license, put a reference to that LICENSE in each header. If you have just five files in one directory that are all licensed the same, I wouldn't even bother with that. Again, the default position is that everything is closed source.
There are jurisdictions that do not allow authors to place their work in the public domain, such as Germany. Main reason is the strict monistic approach the German copyright law bases on. Key feature of this approach is the concept that, in principle, the copyright/author’s right itself can neither be transferred to another person nor waived by the author herself. The German author’s right consists of two parts, the moral rights and the exploitation rights. The moral rights are – as a rule – personal rights that are bound to the person of the creator (or, after her death, her legal heirs), i.e. they can neither be transferred nor waived. Since moral and exploitation rights are considered as inseparable parts of the author’s right as a whole (monistic approach) the exploitation rights cannot – in principle – transferred or waived by contract as well. CC0 is supposed to get you as close to the public domain as possible in your legal system. CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not adapted to the laws of any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses.