Who owns the software created by a dissolved startup company? A theoretical company existed which used to be registered in the United Kingdom and has since been dissolved. The company was a SaaS(Software as a service) company. The code was written by Person A, who was a minority shareholder director of the company. There was no copyright, trademark or other license on the actual code files themselves and the original developer has access to the entire complete codebase. Question: Who 'owns' the code? What freedoms does Person A have to use the code in a similar or project of their choice?
When a company is dissolved, someone takes over the company's asserts, often the creditors, or they may be sold for what they will bring. Failing anyone else, it may be the crown. Assuming that the copyright was in fact owned by the company (and not by someone else and merely licensed to the company), someone owns it, (just as someone owns the physical property that the company had) but it may be hard to find out who. It is even possible that the owner is not aware of the copyright. As for Person A, that depends on the details of A's contract or agreement with the company. A may be a co-owner (unlikely). A may have rights to use the code to some extent. Or A may have no more rights than I do (that is, none at all). According to &quot;Ownership of copyright works &quot; an official UK government web page: Where a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, or a film, is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work (subject to any agreement to the contrary). The expression “in the course of employment” is not defined by the Act but in settling disputes the courts have typically had to decide whether the employee was working under a ‘contract of service’ (eg as an employee) or a ‘contract for services’ (eg as a freelancer or independent contractor). Where a person works under a ‘contract for services’ he will usually retain copyright in any works he produces, unless there is a contractual agreement to the contrary. Thus if person A was acting as an employee of the company, the copyright would automatically be owned by the company, in the absence of any written agreement between A and the company. The page goes on to state: When you ask or commission another person or organisation to create a copyright work for you, the first legal owner of copyright is the person or organisation that created the work and not you the commissioner, unless you otherwise agree it in writing. However, in some circumstances, for example when copyright is not dealt with in the contract to commission the work, courts may be willing to find that there is an implied licence allowing the commissioner to use the work for the purpose for which it was commissioned. This does not necessarily result in a transfer of ownership. Instead, the commissioner of the work may only get a limited non-exclusive licence. ... Thus if A was acting as an employee in creating or co-creating the code, and there was no written agreement on the matter between A and the company, A would have no rights to the code, and the copyright would pass to whoever purchased or was awarded it after the company dissolved. Such a copyright might well have been included in a purchase of &quot;all other assets&quot; (or some such language) and no explicit or specific mention of it been made. The situation in the US would be basically similar. Work by an employee within he scope of employment is a &quot;work-made-for-hire&quot; (WFH) under US copyright law( See 107 USC 101), and the employer is legally the author (which is not true in UK law), unless there is a written agreement to the contrary. The natural person(s) who in fact created the wok have no rights unless an agreement grants such rights. On dissolution the copyright does not end, nor is it transferred to the creator, but passes to whoever bought it, or bought or was awarded the general assets of the company (such as in a bankruptcy proceeding).
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 two common approaches. The first approach is simply to let copyright law apply. Under the default terms, the IT provider has no rights to copy your software. Running software is allowed, of course, and not a problem that you need to deal with vis-a-vis the IT provider. You still can sue them if they copy your software, even in the absence of a contract. That is the chief function of copyright, after all! The second approach is to allow the customer to subcontract third parties to act on behalf of them, while acknowledging that such subcontracting does not dissolve them from any responsibilities towards you. In other words, if the 3rd party would do something unauthorized, you have a claim towards the customer and they have a distinct but related claim towards their IT supplier.
From the perspective of US law: Scenario 1: Removing the watermark is perfectly legal, obviously. You own the copyright. Scenario 2: Abandonware is not really a thing in the US when it comes to copyright (and the Wikipedia article you linked says this.) Even if the company went out of business, the copyright almost certainly went to somebody - the former owners, the creditors, etc. As far as the Internet Archive goes, they are taking advantage of an exemption in the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, along with the copyright exemption found in 17 USC § 108. But both of these exemptions require you to be a "library or archive" to take advantage of them, and you are not a library or archive, so you cannot take advantage of either. As a practical matter, if the software is really abandoned it's unlikely that anyone will actually come after you for infringement, but that's not quite the same as it being legal - you could be on the hook for up to $150,000 in statutory damages per work infringed, if the owner does sue you. You could attempt to claim fair use, of course. If the image is abandoned you might get a favorable result on factor 4 of the fair use test (the effect on the market for the original) since there's no market if nobody can find the owner. But it would depend on the other factors; that alone wouldn't get you fair use. Scenario 3: I'm not sure where you get the idea that downloading a copyrighted image to your desktop is somehow protected. It isn't automatically legal to save a copy of something just because it's on the Internet. And the existence of a watermark may indicate that someone wanted to prevent the file from being copied. The website containing the image will likely have terms of use, which may indicate whether or not you're allowed to make a copy. For example, Stack Exchange's TOS says in part: Subscriber may download or copy the Content, and other items displayed on the Network for download, for personal use, provided that Subscriber maintains all copyright and other notices contained in such Content.
At least in theory an end user could be sued for infringing on a patent, especially a method claim. Given the cost of a patent lawsuit, this strikes me as extremely unlikely to happen though, unless the user in question were an extremely large company, or something on that order. Theoretically, the only difference between open-source software and proprietary software would be that availability of the source code makes it easier to prove use of a patent in open-source software. Releasing the software as open-source doesn't confer any immunity from patent law or anything like that though. Realistically, however, the chances of being sued for infringement if you're basically giving away the software in question are fairly remote. It rarely makes sense for a patent holder to spend millions of dollars on a lawsuit where they stand no chance of even recovering their cost (but no, that certainly should not be taken as legal advice that you're free to infringe on patents, or anything similar--in fact, none of this should be taken as legal advice at all). If you can actually prove that a technique was published or publicly known and used (e.g., in a product that was offered for sale) well before the patent was applied for, the patent is probably invalid (and if proven so in court, the case would normally be dismissed with prejudice, which basically means the patent holder wouldn't be able to sue anybody else for infringement of that patent). I'd note, however, that in my experience this is much less common than most people imagine--many look at (for example) the title of a patent, and assume it lacks originality because it refers to some well-known technique, and ignore the claims where it details the precise differences between the previously known technique and what the patent really covers. Just for example, the EFF used to have a web page talking about a (now long-since expired) patent on how to draw a cursor on screen. In an apparent attempt at scaring the unwary, they showed code they claimed infringed in the patent--despite the fact that the patent's "background of the invention" specifically cited the technique they showed as being previously known, and not covered by the patent.
Ownership is a fundamental concept in property law which can be difficult to apply to software, such as computer games. A physical record of information, such as a game disc, a piece of paper with a product key on it, or a computer hard drive with software installed on it, is personal property (chattels). You own these things. However, copyright law restricts what you can legally do with them. For example, the copyright holder generally has the exclusive right to make a copy of a program, which would generally include downloading (and saving) a game ISO. In recent decades, anti-circumvention provisions have been added to national copyright laws. These generally make it illegal to use cracks and other techniques for circumventing DRM, even if you “own” a copy of the software. What is “owned” is the right to assert a claim in court (a chose in action), which is also a kind of property. Specifically, the right to use proprietary software, or software license, is generally understood as a bundle of contractual rights, often documented in an end user license agreement. (While these contractual rights are a kind of property that can be owned, “ownership” of software can also refer to the rights of the copyright holder, which the more limited rights of a licensee are derived from.) Actually determining the legal effect of a software license is complex. As it is intended to create contractual rights, the terms of the contract (license agreement) are important, but not determinative. Consumer law may impose standard “fair dealing” terms which could have complex effects on the rights associated with a digital product in a particular jurisdiction. Because of the low money value involved, these complex legal issues are rarely tested in court. The specific questions you pose all appear to breach copyright or anti-circumvention law. However, you may have acquired contractual rights, including implied rights associated with your purchase of chattels, or dealings with a platform operator like Steam, which limit the copyright holder’s ability to take action against you. You may also have the right to do things that fall within a fair use or fair dealing exception in your jurisdiction. Again, the law is often untested, especially outside of the United States, because it is rarely in the parties’ interest to litigate. However, the exceptions to anti-circumvention law are often different to, and less permissive than, the exceptions to copyright. To further research your questions in a particular jurisdiction, I would look for exceptions to copyright and anti-circumvention law which protect consumers’ rights, if any, to back up or resell copies of licensed software.
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?
As @amon stated in a comment, copyright requires creativity. If the author of a tool wants to claim copyright on the output of that tool, then that output must contain something that required the creativity of the tool author. For a tool that just re-indents its input, the output is created from the input with a mechanical, non-creative, transformation and the output does not contain any creative content that wasn't already present in the input. For that reason, authors of such tools can't claim any copyright on the output. For a tool like bison, which was mentioned in the comments, the output contains a measurable amount of creative content that was not present in the input, but which was provided by the authors of bison. For that reason, the authors of 'bison' do have a copyright claim on the output of the tool (for which they give a broad permission to use). So, the basic question becomes, how much of the (creative) content of the output can be traced back to the tool itself and not to the input that the tool processed. For linters/formatters, that is likely to be very little. For code generators, it can be anywhere between very little and all of the output. The license restrictions on the code produced by the tool itself are by default the same as the license restrictions on the source of the tool, but the tool author can choose to apply any other license to the tool code that ends up in the output. If the output of the tool is, at least in part, dependent on an input file, then the authors of the input file also have a copyright claim on the tool output (as their creative work influenced the output), so the tool author can not claim exclusive ownership. The usual situation is that for tools that don't add creative content to the output, the author explicitly states that the don't have any copyright claims on the output. For tools that do add creative content, that content might be released under very permissive conditions (like, "you can use the output as a whole for any purpose, but you can only separate out the code that comes from the tool's codebase if you adhere to the &lt;X> license")