Can I build something for personal use if it is patented? Say I like building things and I see an interesting product on the internet. Having seen this, and having the means to build something similar, the interest in the product, and the ability to understand how it works, is there anything wrong with borrowing public information about an object to use in building it myself? I would not attempt to share this object I built, for monetary purposes or otherwise. I would not claim ownership of the object. I would not assist others in building one themselves, aside from maybe showing them the publicly available information I started from as well. Is it legal to create this product and use it personally?
The title of your question suggests that a patent is involved, but it isn't clear from the rest of your question if that is really the case. Simply seeing a product on the internet does not mean that there are any patent rights attached to it. If a patent does exist, then that patent's protection is defined by its claims. In the US, if you make or use an object that includes all the elements of the claims of a granted patent, then you are infringing that patent. It does not matter whether you share the object or attempt to make money from it—simply making or using it is enough to qualify as infringement. That said, based on your intended use, the patent owner is highly unlikely to ever find out about your infringement. Further, even if they did, enforcing patent rights in court is incredibly expensive (typically involving multi-million dollar legal budgets), and they wouldn't stand to recover much from you, so it is even less likely that they would sue you for the infringement.
It depends on the game and what you copy. Games are an utter nightmare when it comes to IP law as so many parts of them cannot be copyrighted. Game rules for example cannot be copyrighted, nor can the concept itself. Some things can be copyrighted or trademarked. You cannot use the following: Names Written elements- while the rules themselves can't be copyrighted, rulebooks can Artwork and other visual elements Miniatures designed for the game Original characters Try to avoid these and the Hasbro lawyers should leave you alone.
Their code, their rules A copyright holder is free to offer their work under none, one or many licences. They can, at the same time, use their own work however they see fit without regard to the licences they have given/sold to others (except, they can only give one person an exclusive licence). As an analogy, let’s say I own a fleet of cars. I can drive my cars anytime I want. I can let Jim drive my cars anytime he wants for free. I can let Mary drive a specific car on Thursdays and only within 10km of the depot. I can let Joe drive my cars providing he pays me $50 a day. And I’m not going to let Fred drive them at all because Fred’s a jerk. Each of those is a different licence.
If you do, can you build/run it without being bound by said license? No, you cannot. Because there is no way to &quot;build/run&quot; it without making a copy. You copy the sourcecode, before you can run your compiler. That is the copy you are making, not copying the file that results from this process. A valid question might be, are you bound by the license? Well, that is up for lawyers and a court to decide, but in all countries I know, copyright is automatic for anything worth copying. And the copyright holder can grant licenses to people to allow things. So arguing you are not bound by a specific license would mean you would argue that you are bound by the legal default, which in most countries is &quot;You cannot copy that. At all. Unless you have explicit permission&quot;. That argument would sound like &quot;I stole all 10, because the offer of buy-one-get-one-free was not legally binding&quot;. Maybe it wasn't. But that doesn't mean you get to do something unrelated illegal instead. Now, there are many exceptions for &quot;personal use&quot;. You can sing any song in the shower. I would assume you can compile any program there, too. You just cannot use that program for anything worthwhile, the same way you cannot record your song in the shower and sell it.
Yet I publicly wear shirts with copyrighted designs all the time. I'm unclear about this; do you mean T-shirts you have made yourself using copyrighted images or T-shirts you have bought? If the former then it is a prima facie breach and you could be sued by the copyright holder. You would probably not be as it would be impracticable. If the latter then there are 2 possibilities: The manufacturer/distributer/retailer chain all hold valid licences to put the image on a T-shirt and display it in the usual way so there is no breach involved. The manufacturer/distributer/retailer chain does not hold a valid licence in which case there is a breach and the copyright holder would target, say Wall-Mart rather than you. what about displaying ... works of art in my yard? Notwithstanding that it can be viewed from a public space, your yard is not public; therefore this is not public display.
Yes and no. [note, the following is all written about US law. In other jurisdictions laws are, of course, different (though usually not drastically so.)] In the US there are (at least) three different bodies of law that might apply to code: copyright, patents, trade secrets. Copyright covers original expression. Anything you write is automatically, immediately protected under copyright. The copyright applies to the code itself, and anything "derived" from that code. It's up to the courts to decide exactly what "derived" means. One case that's long been viewed as a landmark in this area is Gates Rubber v. Bando Chemicals. The Court of Appeals for the tenth Circuit decision includes a section titled: "The Test for Determining Whether the Copyright of a Computer Program Has Been Infringed." Note that you can register a copyright, and that can be worthwhile, such as helping recover some damages you can't otherwise. Patents are quite different from copyrights. Where a copyright covers expression of an idea, a patent covers a specific invention. Rather than being awarded automatically, a patent has to be applied for, and awarded only after the patent office has determined that there's no relevant prior art to prevent it from being awarded. A patent, however, covers things like somebody else independently discovering/inventing what's covered by the patent. A trade secret could (at least theoretically) apply to some process or procedure embodied in the code. A trade secret mostly applies to a situation where (for example) you're trying to form an alliance with some other company, and in the process tell them things you don't tell the general public. If you've identified the fact that what you're telling them is a trade secret, and they then tell a competitor (or the general public, etc.) or more generally use that information in any way other than the originally intended purpose, it could constitute a trade secret violation. As a side-note: patents and copyright fall under federal law, so they're basically uniform nation-wide. Trade secrets mostly fall under state law, so the exact details vary by state. Absent a reason to believe otherwise, I'd guess your interest here is primarily in copyright infringement. The key here would be showing that one piece of code was derived from the other. That is, it specifically would not apply in a case where there were only a limited number of ways of doing something, so anybody who wanted to do that had to use one of those ways. Since this would not indicate actual derivation, it would not indicate copyright violation.
Copyright and patents are two very very different things. Copyrighting a standard means the wording of the standard can not be copied without the copyright holders permission. It does not protect the ideas expressed in the document, just the way those ideas are expressed. IEEE standards, for example, are copyrighted by the IEEE and therefore you can't make a copy of the Ethernet specification, you need to buy it from them. That has nothing to do with implementing an Ethernet device. To implement something described in a technical specification might or might not require one or more patent licenses. The authors of the standard may not even be aware that something they require for the standard has already been invented and patented by someone else. Many standard bodies do impose a requirement on participants in the standard's creation that they offer licenses to any patents they own that are needed to implement the standard on a fair and equal basis to all. It is called FRAND - the acronym for fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing.
Ideas (methods of playing, game mechanics, strategy, goals) cannot be protected by copyright. But any part of a creative work can. So, no copying of drawings, patterns, images, sounds, or the element. I suppose copying the software code is not an issue here, but it can, obviously, also not be copied. And nothing in your game can look like someone's else trademark.