Why is it legal for public funded researchers to transfer their paper ownership to private publishers? Maybe it belongs to the academia forum, but I have never understood why public funded researchers can transfer their paper ownership to private publishers. We, the taxpayers, fully pay for the researchers salaries, laboratories material, infrastructure etc. so why can they just give all of their results to someone else? Why do we have to pay again for something we have already paid for? Despite having myself worked in public research, I genuinely can't tell what is the difference between allowing this, or allowing a bakery to tell their clients &quot;Remember this cake you already pay for? We gave it to someone else, but I'm sure he will be willing to sell it back to you!&quot;. Similarly, a private company would never let its R&amp;D employees decide on their own whether to publish something in a scientific journal. To simplify, maybe this question can be restricted to US or whatever European country for which someone has an answer. EDIT: I'm also specifically asking about scientific publications, not patents. Maybe I can restrict it even further with two specific cases: You work for a private company You work for CNRS (French research organism) In situation 2, You can spend your working time (paid by CNRS): Reviewing papers for a private publisher, who will not pay me nor the CNRS. Writings books and scientific articles, then freely transfer the rights to a private publisher. Of course you can't do that in situation 1. Yet, from what I remember from the contracts, there was not much difference between 1 and 2 (besides maybe patents).
This is a US-law answer. The Constitution protects various rights of individuals, and in general, there is no abrogation of your rights if you receive a benefit from government. Your presumption that taxpayers fully fund researchers and materials is incorrect, in the US, although there are some researchers whose salaries are entirely paid by taxes. So as a matter of basic law, a person is entitled to intellectual property that they create, regardless of how they interact with the taxing structure. US law has a concept of &quot;work for hire&quot;, whereby if I am hired by Podunk U to write a book, the book may be the property of Podunk U and not me the author. Usually, publicly supported institutions have policies that reign in the tendency of universities to lay claim to the research output of their faculty (but not staff) in terms of copyright, but not patents. In principle, a publicly supported university could hold that faculty are hired to write books and therefore any book that they write is a work for hire. This is not done for mostly political reasons. There are various employer-mandated obligations on university employees to make works &quot;open access&quot;, but it would take an act of Congress to make this a uniform legal requirement for, e.g., &quot;anyone working for a company who in some manner receives funding from the federal government&quot;. There is no such law in the US. Incidentally, this liberty extends to other domains, such as food, because all food is in some way touched by federal money. The explanation for why the law is what it is is entirely political, that in the US, the concept of private property is recognized and protected by law, and there is no law allowing the arbitrary taking of private property. The law can be changed (it may take some constitutional amendments). You could follow this up on Politics SE to ask, what would be the most-acceptable abrogation of property rights in the US which had the effect that &quot;if you receive direct or indirect tax support, you lose your property rights&quot; (probably too broad for SE, but that's the underlying political issue). If you want a model of what such a law might look like, you can start with the US law regarding patents and federal assistance. There are many specifics which would have to be re-written to get the situation where a person benefitting from government funding must turn over their copyright to government. First you would have to pin down what it means to benefit from taxpayer support. The usual way this is done is in terms of being a party to a funding contract between a government agency and an employer. This has no direct effect on authors (who 99.99% of the time do not contract with the government), so the law would also have to require parties to government funding contracts to impose contractual restrictions on any individuals vaguely receiving a benefit from such funding, so that those who benefit from a funding contract must assign copyright to the government. The set of people who benefit indirectly from grants is vastly larger than the set of people who receive dollar amounts from grants, so the law needs to be specific (do students who learn from teachers supported by a grant therefore themselves benefit from tax dollars). This is a major infringement on the property rights of individuals, so such a law would be challenged in court and subject to strict scrutiny. It is unlikely that the case can be made that turning over copyright to the government is a compelling government interest; however the interest is stated, it would have to be the least restrictive and most narrowly tailored means of accomplishing that end.
You are creating a derivative work. You are only allowed to do this if the library comes with a license that allows this. If you want to give your derivative work to anyone else, copying it is copyright infringement unless the license allows it. Copying the derivative work and attaching a different license is most likely to be copyright infringement. And if people receive a copy with an open source license that is not justified and rely on it, that’s creating one unholy legal mess for everyone involved and can be massively more expensive than plain copyright infringement. No license means you don’t have permission to do anything with it, not creating derivative work, not distributing it, and certainly not publish it with an open source license.
Software qua property is protected by copyright *perhaps patent, in some jurisdiction). The general rule is that whoever creates the thing (book, song, software) has the exclusive right to the thing. If an employee of Company 1 writes software for Company 2, that employee might (rarely) hold the copyright, but typically that scenario would involve a "work for hire", where the employee is hired by Company 1 to do such tasks as part of his duties with Company 1 (which might then be given to Company 2). This would then be a work for hire, and the copyright is held by Company 1. If the actual author was an independent contractor, he would hold the copyright – see Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reed for analysis of the subtle nuances in making that determination. The concept "work for hire" which crucially involves the "employee" relationship would not be applicable to Company 2 paying Company 1 for a product, and as long as the actual author is an employee of C1, C1 has not created a "work for hire" in the legal sense. Without some explicit disposition of copyright, Company 2 is in a sketchy position. Since C1 holds copyright, they must grant a license to C2 so that C2 can legally use it; or, C1 must transfer copyright to C2. This does not happen automatically, and (if C1 does not want to remedy the situation after the fact) C2 would need to take C1 to court to force a resolution to the situation. At that point, the issue would be what C1 implicitly promised, even though they didn't put it in writing. It is likely that the initial exchange was along the lines "Can you make us a program that will do X?", and the answer was "Sure, that will cost Y", and then "Okay, go ahead, looking forward to the product". The courts would not simply say "Well, you didn't explicitly require a license, so you don't get to actually use the software that you paid for". However, it's a somewhat open question whether the court would order a license (of what nature?) or a transfer of copyright. The disposition would depend heavily on the facts of the case (what was said, what C1 actually did, what kind of business they are, what did creating the work involve...).
It is reasonable to interpret the statement in their Github repository README.md as a "public domain" license for anything contained there. However, their "usage guidelines" backpedals a bit ("generally are not copyrighted", the misleading implication that content used commercially is subject to restrictions that educational and personal uses are not subject to). Although it is true that works "created by the US government" are not protected by copyright, not everything associated with a government agency is created by the US government. An agency might have a policy that they will not post material that is not copyright-free, there is no practical means of knowing if an item is an actual government work, versus a government-supported or government-hosted work (where copyright is held by someone else). If you trust their implication that all of those items in the repository are indeed government works, then they are free of copyright. I don't know any reason to not believe them, although sometimes the government is wrong and they end up liable big-time for infringement. However... NASA Open Source Agreement Version 1.3 (another copy on a NASA web page) on first glance seems to contradict the "government work" theory. Here, they claim to grant certain rights to users and also impose impose restrictions (including obligatory registration). This does not make any sense for a work that is in the public domain. The license is legally defective in that it fails to fill in relevant blanks (agency name, title of work, URL for obligatory registration). Also notice that the license is only for software. The scope of that license therefore has to be something narrower – it applies only to software, and presumably software that is not "a government work". I have no idea what software NASA could legally give away and is not a government work which is therefore not protected by copyright.
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Yes The US constitution is in the public domain. Anyone may publish a version of it, including an altered version. No US law forbidding publication of an altered version would itself be constitutional -- the First Amendment would prevent such a law. However, if an altered version were sold under such conditions that a customer might reasonably believe it to be an unaltered version, that might be false advertising, or perhaps fraud, because the seller would be deceiving the customer as to what the product is.
A person can only patent their own original invention. If the technology which is the subject of the patent existed before it was filed, then the patent is not enforceable. This is called prior art. Note that the rights to a patent can always be placed in the public domain. Patent just means "make obvious" in Latin. So, if you obtain a patent, that does not necessarily mean you are blocking other people from using the technology. There are also various established ways for publishing your technology to guarantee that it is in the public domain.
A book (or any other creative work) published in the 1800s is now in the public domain everywhere in the world (excepting odd cases like Peter Pan where a special rule applies in some jurisdictions.) Anyone may legally quote from such a work at any length with no legal requirement for permission. In fact there is no legal requirement to attribute the quote to the author (although there is an ethical requirement). In fact one may publish a new edition of such a work, unchanged or modified in any way one chooses, with no legal need to obtain permission from anyone or to pay any royalties or fees. If the work were recent enough to still be protected by copyright, a limited quote could be used under fair use, fair dealing or another exception to copyright under the laws of most countries. The exact rules vary by country, and are often highly fact-dependent, so the exact details will matter. If one wanted to quote enough from a recent work that permission is required, the copyright holder, who is often not the publisher, would need to grant permission. That is often the author or the author's heir, but it can be a person or firm to which the author transferred the rights. Sometimes the rights-holder can be hard to identify. Update: it would be possible for a work published in, say, 1890 by an author then young who lived to a fairly old age, dying in, say 1960, to still be protected in some countries, although not in the US. (Anything published before 1925 is now PD in the US.) But Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, and all of her work has long been in the public domain