Is it legal to use ingredients found in an existing product? Is it legal to use ingredients from an existing product? For example, imagine I love Bio-Oil and I decide I want to make something similar, would it be legal or illegal if I used every ingredient in it, then I add two other ingredients that are not included? Would Bio-Oil be able to sue me with the claim that my product consisted of most of their ingredients, but not exactly the same? Basically, the ingredients are listed on the packaging, but the same ingredients are ingredients that you find commonly used in that type of product. My thought is, no one really has ownership of ingredients (e.g., body oils often use the same standard ingredients), so how can they suspect I was copying them?
That depends on how you get the ingredient list. If the list is published and not protected by a patent, then anyone is free to use it in making the same or a similar product. If the product is patented and the ingredient list is covered by the patent, and the patent is currently in force, then making a similar product would probably be patent infringement, and the patent holder could sue and collect damages. If the list is secret, and has been protected as a Trade Secret, and if the would-be imitator gets the formula improperly, then the owner of the formula would have valid grounds for a trade secret lawsuit and to collect damages in that suit. Improper means would include breaking into the owner's files, or inducing an employee or contractor to violate a confidentiality agreement. But analyzing the product and figuring out its composition, a form of reverse engineering would be perfectly proper, and would give the formula owner no claim. Similarly, if the owner was careless and allowed the formula to be disclosed, the imitator would have done nothing improper. So the outcome depends on the details of facts not stated in the question.
Exactly the same way it works over all other content There are no special classes of copyright, there’s just copyright. What a user of a service may do with copyright materials will be spelled out in the licence. If there is no licence, then they are left with fair use/fair dealing.
A name is not protected by copyright. It can be protected as a trademark, but it would almost certainly be allowed as nominative fair use, since the alternative of indirect descriptive reference ("the grocery store founded in 1930 by George W. Jenkins") is not only cumbersome, but it doesn't even answer the question, where only the name can be used. Trademark protection is not absolute ownership of a word, it is the right to a specific use of a word (e.g. to identify a specific brand of computer for commercial purposes). If you use a trademark symbol, you have to be careful to use the right one (it may be illegal to imply registration by using R when the trademark is not registered). As far as I can determine, there is no obligation for a third party to so mark trademark terms, though it is commonly done.
The example in the question is a pretty clear case of nominative use. The mark is being used to refer to, or name, the product (or service). It is not being used to sell a similar product, or anything else. No reasonable person could take it to indicate that the trademark owner has endorsed the person making the statement, nor that there is any sort of affiliation. This page from the International Trademark Association describes the concept. This concept is sometimes called "fair use" by analogy with the concept in US copyright law, but that term is not strictly accurate. It is better to simply say "nominative use" or "descriptive use". Digital Media Law's page on "Using the trademarks of others" says: As a general matter, if you are reporting on, commenting on, or criticizing a trademark owner, most ordinary consumers will not be confused about whether the company or organization is the source or sponsor of your work. You can reduce the likelihood of confusion further by avoiding a website design that looks like the trademark owner's site or resembles its product packaging, and you should never festoon your website with a company's logo (but isolated use when relevant to a discussion is OK) ... If someone threatens you with a lawsuit or sues you for trademark dilution, then a lack of consumer confusion will not help you. Here, one obvious line of defense is to argue that there is no likelihood of dilution. Federal and state dilution law protects a trademark owner against the whittling away of the distinctiveness of its famous trademark by association with other goods or services; it does not give a trademark owner the right to shut down all unflattering speech about it. If you do not associate a famous trademark with your own goods or services, then there can be no dilution (or at least that's how your argument goes). ... The nominative fair use defense protects your ability to use a trademark to refer to a trademark owner or its goods or services for purposes of reporting, commentary, criticism, and parody, as well as for comparative advertising. Courts impose three requirements on defendants who want to take advantage of the nominative fair use defense: (1) the trademark owner, product, or service in question must not be readily identifiable without use of the trademark; (2) the defendant must use only as much of the mark as is necessary to identify the trademark owner, product, or service; and (3) the defendant must do nothing that would suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark owner. This defense works against trademark infringement lawsuits. The federal dilution statute, found at 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)(3)(A), also makes nominative fair use a complete defense to trademark dilution claims.
All your work is yours. They've made it very clear it wasn't a work for hire, so it's yours. They can't copyright any of their ideas. You can't copyright an idea. Only specific creative elements authored by them and present in your work could be covered by copyright. You didn't use their block diagrams. I don't see how references to other sites to look at would constitute a creative element they authored. That said, you probably want to talk to a lawyer and get a written legal opinion that you can rely on.
I agree that you have a very strong copyright fair use case. Although the logo is creative and you're using the entire thing, your use is for a nonprofit educational purpose and does not affect the value of the work. The logo is also probably trademarked. But you aren't using the mark in commerce, so I don't think that will be a problem for you.
Depending on your jurisdiction, such lists may be protected, but not by copyright. For example, in Germany there was a court decision that scanning all the country’s phone books and selling them on CD constituted “unfair competition” and was illegal, while hiring 1000 typists who would manually type in all this information would not be. Databases are protected in many jurisdictions, and a list of the 1000 most commonly used English words could reasonably be called a database.
It does mean that you cannot reuse any parts of the source code, even small simple ones. You would have to rebuild the code from scratch. There is a significant chance that the code would be "substantially similar" to the code that you were hired to build, also that if anybody else were to write a bubble sort or 24-to-am/pm conversion routine, it would look the same, where even variable names (which should describe function) are the same or very similar. In case of an infringement lawsuit, you would have to defend yourself by showing that there are only a few ways to code a given function. Copyright protects only the "expression", not the abstract idea. A linked list is an idea, which can't be protected by copyright; same with recursion, pointers, stacks, object-oriented programming... Anything that involves copy and paste is infringement. If you re-read the copyrighted code and then try to reconstruct it, you probably crossed the infringement line. If you remember the problems and solutions and accidentally write somewhat similar code, that is probably on the safe side. From the perspective of the programmer not wanting to always reinvent the wheel, it would be most useful to make a distinction in the contract between "the essentials of the customer's program" versus "incidental utility work". The difficulty will arise in saying specifically what is essential vs. incidental. For instance, I know that if I were to hire you to develop a speech-recognition system, low-level audio-acquisition and encoding would not be essential to my purpose, whereas DSP parsing routines would be the center of my interest. The programmer would then want to retain recycling rights to all non-essential code.