If someone reviews my software program, when do they share its copyright? Suppose I refactor my program based on its reviews on codereview.SE. (Or someone reviews my pull request on GitHub.) Presumably, if I include the reviewer's code, they share copyright to my new program, unless their code is trivial. But what about the following cases: I use the reviewer's code as a starting point and change it for my program. (I guess this depends on the changes.) The reviewer suggests detailed solutions in English, e.g., bug fixes or software designs. Then I translate these solutions into code. (I'm based in the UK, if this matters.) Note: A good concrete example is the following question (which I'm not involved in): validating-credit-card-numbers.
If you use the reviewer's code, or code derived from it (e.g. if you just changed a variable name) then they own the copyright on that part of the software. If the reviewer describes a solution which you implement, or if you re-implement the code from scratch while taking ideas and methods from the reviewer's code, then you own the copyright on that code. However if there are only a few ways to implement something in code then the code is not creative and hence cannot be copyrighted. For example the regular expression in the question you link to is (as far as I can tell) the only correct solution to the problem: any programmer addressing the problem will have come up with that RE. In this the position is akin to a database of phone numbers: while the collection may be copyright (depending on whether selection or arrangement required creativity), the fact that Alice Jones has the number 012345 is not copyrightable, and neither is the alphabetical arrangement of names. Where it gets messy is the boundary between the two. The requirement to detect 4 or more repeated digits in a credit card number could be implemented in a number of ways, but whether there are enough of these to qualify any particular solution as "creative" would be a matter of fact for a court to decide.
If you are utilizing the name of the characters just so users can rate them (by rate - I mean rank, review, critique) you should be fine. Copyrights are subject to "fair use" by the public. For purposes such as review, criticism, and comment - this is generally considered to be fair use. Is the site commercial or for-profit? That could impact the analysis, but only if you are making money flowing from the use of the actual copyrighted material(s), rather than advertising (like Adsense) or something similar (this should not suggest that those type sites cannot violate copyright, but it's part of the analysis). If it is something you are investing money into creating, you may want to get a formal legal opinion. But if the site if for fun, or hobby, you are likely fine if what's described is the only use. http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/copyright-fair-use-and-how-it-works-for-online-images/ This link is to a great, easy to read and understand article on fair use, what it is and what it allows. Keep in mind each case is fact intensive, however, from what you are describing this seems fine.
Evaluating a potential copyright violation is very fact-intensive, so we don't have enough information to answer the question. Making a copy is generally going to be a copyright violation, but there's still going to be a lot of breathing room under the fair use doctrine. Again, we'd need more details to provide a useful answer, but you may be able to analyze the question yourself using the following information. Analysis of fair-use defenses looks at four questions, and the answers to the questions can tip the scales in favor of or against a finding of fair use: Does your kind of copying affect the market for the original? To what extent can your copy fulfill the demand for the original? What if there were widespread copying of the kind you're considering? The more potential there is for the copies to replace the original, the less likely it is to be fair use. This is the most important factor in the analysis. Why did you make the copy? If you made the copy for purposes of news reporting, criticism, or commentary, it's more likely to be fair use. If you made a copy just so you could watch again later whenever you feel like it, that's may still be fair use, but it is somewhat less likely. If you made a copy so you could sell it for profit, that's almost certainly not fair use. How much did you copy? Did you copy the whole thing, or did you copy only as much as you needed to achieve your purpose under Question 2? If you copy "too much" -- both in the raw amount and as a fraction of the whole work -- it's less likely to be fair use. What did you copy? Such works can be copyrighted but are not part of the Highly creative works, such as poems, music, and movies, are at the "core" of copyright principles. A fair use analysis will be more stringent in these cases than when copying a purely factual work, such as a phone book, biography, or list of statistics. This is the least important factor in the analysis. So take all of those and imagine the answer to each on a spectrum. If you see things generally tipping in the direction of fair use, that's a good indication that you're going to be safe. If you see things tipping in the other direction, you may want to reconsider. Again, these can be notoriously tricky questions. If you're dealing with a real situation, you should consult an attorney to get an answer specific to your situation.
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?
In general, unless the license contains a clause which allows it to be modified at a later date through some defined means (publication, revocation of existing license etc) then you are free to continue to use the existing version of the software under the original license terms. So make sure you pin your versions! Look out for clauses such as exists in the GPL which allow the recipient of the distributed binary or code to choose what version of the GPL to apply if the original author does not state (GPLv2 Clause 9) as they then allow recipients to bind you, the distributor, to versions you might not agree with (eg the switch to GPLv3 with its patents clauses).
I wrote a letter to the Eclipse Foundation. The consultant pointed me to section 5 in their FAQ. My case falls under the term "linking". He warned that he isn't a lawyer, but offered the following short answer: The Eclipse Foundation does not consider linking with EPL content to be a derivative work and so you are not required to disclose your source code.
The creator of the derivative work has copyright in the derivative work. The copyright would protect only the new elements of the derivative work. Wikipedia is a good place to start. In the case of a book with updated grammar, depending on the extent of the changes, it would probably be easier to copy the original directly than to eliminate the updates from a copy of the derivative work.
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.