Can contract text itself be subject to copyright? I am a business owner and I have a competitor who plays dirty in general. My competitor is very greedy and does not want to spend money and pay lawyer. So she took my contract, I use to serve customers and used it as a template for her contract, copied it word to word. A few details are changed, like payment requisites and maximum allowed service periods, but otherwise it's the same contact and I some time ago I have payed a lawyer to create template. So, is contract text itself subject to copyright? What are my options? P.S. Answers for European jurisdictions are more welcome.
is contract text itself subject to copyright? What are my options? It largely depends on the originality of your contract. C &amp; J Management Corp. v. Anderson, 707 F.Supp.2d 858, 862 (2009) points to multiple references against preclusion of "a copyrightable interest in a contract". But you would need to prove that your competitor copied "original elements" of your contract including "a minimum degree of creativity and originality required to support a valid copyright". See Donald v. Uarco Business Forms, 478 F.2d 764, 766 (1973). Your post provides no information that would help identifying or ruling out this issue in your matter. Without realizing, you might have paid dearly for boilerplate language that your lawyer copied from somewhere else. Indeed, there is so much regurgitation and copy/pasting in the legal "profession" (judges included, as is notorious in judicial opinions they release and in the similarities --verbatim-- among the procedure law of many, many U.S. jurisdictions). That regurgitation is not bad in and of itself, though, since what matters is the expeditious administration of justice and the protection of your rights, rather than obtaining creative expressions authored by some lawyer. You might end up wasting valuable energy and money if you went after the competitor for something like this without first assessing the extent of originality in your contract. Focus instead on the much more detrimental fact that your competitor "plays dirty in general".
Written down computer code is subject to copyright. If you do not have the permission of the owner to copy it you are breaching their copyright unless your use constitutes fair use/dealing.
The fact that a developer is showing off work that he/she has done for other another company doesn't imply that that developer owns any copyright to the work. In Canada, see the Copyright Act, § 13 (3): Where the author of a work was in the employment of some other person under a contract of service or apprenticeship and the work was made in the course of his employment by that person, the person by whom the author was employed shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright and § 13 (4): The owner of the copyright in any work may assign the right... In the US, see 17 U.S.C. § 201 (b): In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright. and § 201 (d): The ownership of a copyright may be transferred... "What rights should and should not be attributed to the developer?" That is a business decision to be made on a case-by-case basis. Advice about the prudent balance of copyright between an employer/client and employee/contractor is legal advice. "Is it okay to use this projects as part of the developer's portfolio?" If the developer can link to public use of a product that he/she developed for a company, then the developer is not violating copyright by simply advertising that they worked on the product and linking to, without reproducing, the work. If the developer for whatever reason maintained copyright ownership in the code and other assets, it would not be copyright infringement to reproduce those as part of the portfolio. If the developer did not maintain copyright ownership in the code or assets, reproducing those may be copyright infringement, dependent on whether the copyright owner allowed the developer to reproduce those elements, or if the reproduction is fair use. There may be other laws or contracts implicated, though: non-disclosure agreements, trademark law, among others.
Ideas are not subject to copyright protection. See 17 USC 102: In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work If you want protection, keep your ideas to yourself and create a concrete expression in the form of a program, which is protected by copyright.
Yes. The copyright owner of a work has the exclusive right to "reproduce the copyrighted work" or to make "derivative works" of it. 17 USC 106. Copyright law is older than the photocopier, and it applies to copies made by means of any technology. If your intent is to duplicate the protected work, whether you do it by tracing, photocopying, or even freehand, you are infringing that right. It is possible that you could squeeze into one of the copyright exceptions, such as fair use, but these are much narrower than people tend to assume they are (especially outside of the U.S.), and they boil down to: "Well, yes, I copied your copyrighted work, but..." The bottom line is: is it copyrighted? Did you copy it, in whole or in part? Then, unless you have a very good reason, you've infringed the copyright. Whether you do it by means of tracing paper, jellygraph, or iPhone doesn't matter.
Any written communication is generally admissible Subject to all the normal rules for admissibility of course. For texts between you and a third party the major issue that springs to mind is relevance. As in, how are they relevant to the dispute between you and this man? If they are not, your lawyer should have objected to them on this basis, however, its too late now. I'm curious as to how he obtained these and whether it was done legally or not. Illegality will not affect their admissibility as the exclusionary rule doesn't apply to civil matters, however, it does speak to the gentleman's character.
The notice has a lot to do with legacy requirements in the United States to claim the copyright to a work. Up until 1989, the copyright notice was required. Today, the statements are mainly maintained to protect against "innocent infringement" which might reduce what a content owner can get in court. What exactly do those terms entail? That the owner stated owns all rights and you may do nothing with the content. My biggest concern is this: by writing that, is the company claiming to own everything on the website, even potentially copyrighted user-submitted material? That's exactly what they are doing. Depending on the terms of the specific site, content contributors generally either assign copyright to the site owner or license the content in a way that allows the site owner to do exactly what they want with it. Site creators with the smarts or money to do it right/get someone to do it right usually state something like: Copyright [Site Owner] and contributors. Other sites (like this one) state specifically what they hold the copyright to: site design / logo © 2015 Stack Exchange Inc THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. CONSULT AN ATTORNEY REGARDING YOUR SPECIFIC SITUATION.
You can make a derivative work if: the original is not under copyright, you are the copyright owner, you hold a licence from the copyright owner that says you can, or your usage is fair use or fair dealing as applicable. For your proposal, the image is copyright, you don’t own it, you don’t have a licence and what you propose is neither fair use nor fair dealing. You can’t do it and you can be sued if you do.