In the US, what stops public libraries from being overcrowded with remote workers? The main con that comes with the double-edged sword of remote work is isolation from in-person human contact. You can socialize just fine, to an extent, through applications like Slack, but there's also something to be said for having some in-person socialization throughout the day. Therefore shared workspaces and things like that have a solid purpose. However whereas shared workspaces can be expensive, public libraries are free. So assuming someone just needs their laptop to work, and not two huge monitors or anything else like that - assuming they can just throw everything in a normal-sized laptop bag - what's stopping them from using the public library 8 hours a day, 5 days a week indefinitely? (Just to be clear, I'm not talking about chatting with people throughout the day. It's just the idea of having other people in close proximity, as an ambient aspect, and that sort of thing in general. Occasionally having someone to nod to while walking by and that kind of thing. The thing that's being avoided is being completely alone inside one's apartment all day or something.) Libraries will often have free wi-fi, a free place to charge the laptop, free everything except coffee. And if it's just the occasional person doing this, they probably won't mind. However, especially considering the work-from-home situation with COVID-19, what's stopping these places from being swarmed and overcrowded indefinitely with people of this nature? In particular, in a typical US municipality, what legal setup blocks public libraries from being swarmed by people using them indefinitely as free work offices? What are the normal legal limits that allow libraries to get used like this in moderation, while preventing them from getting overrun? FWIW, the main reason this has come to my mind is that, for certain reasons, I've been spending a few weeks on the other side of the US from where I live. During this time, I've found working inside the local library to be usually fairly preferable to working inside the hotel/hostel. So much so, that it's tempting to keep doing this once I'm back home next week, and I'm wondering how much is too much, and how that's reflected in a typical legal setup. This question was suggested as a duplicate: Legal Doubts Regarding Park Rules The important thing here is that I am not talking about breaking any rules. The second the library tells me to pack up the computer, I will. However no such limit has been imposed for several days, and they've actually acted fairly friendly and accommodating up to this point. Therefore, is there anything in the law (in a typical setup) that places a major limit on this type of usage? If it is nothing more than just simply waiting until the library staff say something, then that answers the question. I just want to make sure there's nothing in a typical legal setup that places a meaningful limit on this.
First point: During the pandemic, most libraries have ceased in person services and only do downloads, pre-arranged loans, pick up and drop off. Second point: In non-pandemic times, typical U.S. municipal library is a somewhat odd mix of young children with parents or nannies, homeless people, remote workers who don't need to talk on the phone much, retirees, and middle school and high school students studying and reading for pleasure (with the studying more common among students whose home situations aren't well suited to studying due to poverty, many siblings or housemates, or noisy family members or neighbors who play instruments). Libraries are usually incentivized to be well occupied as it helps when they seek municipal budget contributions or tax levies. FWIW, I've used municipal libraries for lengthy research projects as a lawyer now and then, both in times when I've been between offices (e.g. at one point tenant finish wasn't done at my new office but my old lease has expired and I was mostly working from home), and when I need to concentrate and the phone and colleagues interrupting me with innocent reasonable questions that aren't urgent keep interrupting me. Third point: It is rare in practice for libraries to be overwhelmed with remote workers, in part, because you can't really talk on the phone or attend Zoom meetings, or meet with people. It is also poor for spreading out with a lot of dead tree paper, especially if filing is necessary. Coffee shops which allow for talking and allow food and drink are more popular and commonly used by low volume realtors and lawyers without offices (I used them for meetings when I was a newly admitted solo practitioner), day traders, freelance and novel writers, graduate students, etc. The prohibition on talking and on consuming food and drinks in the library mostly solves the problem. Also, lots of remote workers don't want to work someplace that has little children squealing during story time and lots of homeless people. In my experience, the most common kind of remote workers in municipal libraries are day traders. It is much more common for municipal libraries in the U.S. (which are one of the only places you can just be without spending money) to come up with ways to limit homeless people (or to better accommodate them) than to boot them out. Many municipal libraries in urban areas have hired social workers in lieu of security staff to regulate things, place limits on sleeping in the place, and sometimes place a maximum number of hours in place. CLOSING THOUGHT: Libraries are publicly owned property, and as such, library managers have not only the regulatory authority of a representative of the government, but also all of the rights of a property owner at their disposal legally. This gives them wide discretion to adopt and enforce rules that couldn't be imposed otherwise.
For a large organization, software licensing compliance is a very broad and intractable problem. The licensing environment is very different for the big company than it is for little tiny you. Many large companies are subject to audits by software vendors (i.e. Adobe, Oracle, etc.) in which they have to show licenses purchased for each active seat. There's a whole new INDUSTRY around maintaining license compliance. An employee bringing in their own software and installing it on a company computer complicates this vastly. That is the environment that the question should be considered within. The large company makes the decision somewhere along the way that your individual efficiency in performing your individual tasks is less important than maintaining auditable software licensing compliance. Since they own the computer/laptop/server, it's their decision. Many times it seems that corporate policies as they apply to the individual worker are obstructive and limiting, but there's a bigger picture to the situation.
A document can be distributed under more than one license. Just because it has been made available under a CC license for free, doesn't mean that IEEE can't negotiate a different license with different terms that allow them to sell the content. (This is similar to the way that a software library can be available for free under a license that permits non-commercial use, but also be made available for a fee for commercial use.) If you want to know whether IEEE is legally selling Aaron Swartz's manuscript, you can contact Morgan &amp; Claypool, the publisher that owns the copyright, and ask them whether this use by IEEE has been authorized by them. For the other documents you mention, contact MIT Press. Etc.
Content posted to the web is usually openly accessible to all (unless protected by a password, paywall, or similar restriction). But that does not mean it is freely copyable by all. Such content is protected by copyright in just the same way as if it had been published in a book of essays by various contributors. Unless the copyright holders (who are likely to be the original authors, but might not be) give permission, or an exception to copyright applies, copying such content would be clear and obvious copyright infringement, and any copyright holder could sue for damages. Permission could be given by publishing the content under a permissive license, such as a CC-BY-SA license, or any of many other available permissive licenses. Or a would-be reuser could find the copyright holders and ask for permission. If the holder cannot be found or identified, or does not respond, then no permission has been granted. In the US the main exception to copyright is fair use. See this answer and other threads with the fair-use tag here for more on fair use. Since the question seems to contemplate using the whole of the posted content, since it might well damage any potential market for that content, and since the use does not seem to be &quot;transformative&quot;, nor used for criticism or comment, a finding of fair use for this situation seems unlikely. But Fair use findings are very much fact-driven, and the exact facts do matter. Thus I cannot be at all sure whether a court would find this toi be fair use or not. In other countries there are a variety of exceptions to copyright, and I have not come close to reviewing them all. But none of the ones I know of seem to apply to the situation described in the question. Many are narrower than the US concept of fair use. I fear that without permission, copying this content would be infringement. However, it would not be infringement to create a site that includes a link to the existing content, and a summary or description of that content, along with new content, including comments on the old, with brief quotes to indicate what is being commented on.
You are right that this is probably a private space; you are wrong in thinking it is your private space; it isn't. The space belongs to your employer and they can do whatever they want with their space unless there is a law that says they can't. As to what type of "hidden surveillance" is allowed that depends on your particular circumstances including what state and federal laws apply and the employment contract you are covered by. As a starting point, if this was happening in Australia then: If you gave permission, all would be legal If you did not give permission: it would be illegal to record anything taking place across a public telecommunications system (i.e. phone tapping) it would be legal for anyone to make an audio recording (not phone tapping) of any conversation to which they were a party it would be legal to make a video recording without sound.
Assumptions Let us assume that the code involved was created during the period of employment, was within the scope of that employment, and was validly work-made-for-hire (WFH). In that case, the code copyright is owned by the former employer.dn the person who wrote it has no more rights than a random stranger would. I am also going to assume US law. Ownership of Ideas Who owns the ideas, the knowledge of how these libraries work? No one does. In the absence of a patent, no one ever &quot;owns&quot; an idea. ]17 USC 102(b)](https://copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#102) provides: (b) 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. Derivative Works Copyright law does prohibit anyone making a derivative work from a work protected by copyright without the permission of the owner. A derivative work is one &quot;based on&quot; the source work. The classic case is a translation. Exactly when a piece of software is a derivative work of another is fact-dependent. Bu several things are clear. If the source work is trivial and obvious, ther may not be sufficient &quot;originality&quot; for the source work to be protected by copyright at all. If the source work is not protected by a valid copyright, nothing is a derivative work of it. A &quot;hello world&quot; program, for example, is probably not original enough for any copyright. A straight-forward implementation of a basic algorithm like quicksort is probably not original enough, either. If there is only one way, or only a small number of ways, to express the ideas of the source work, the merger doctrine applies. This means that the expression of the work is merged into the idea, leaving the expression unprotected. When the merger doctrine applies, there is, in effect, no copyright. If a work copies ideas from a source, but none of its particular expression of those ideas, the result is not a derivative work, and is not an infringement of copyright. If a work is definitive, but is also a fair use of the source work, it is not an infringement. The usual four-factor fir use analysis must be made to determine this. In particular, if a work is highly transformative, it is likey to be found to be a fair use. Issues from the Question What if the new code (presumably, in the case of something simple) comes out exactly the same (even if I rewrite it without looking)? That Rather suggests that the work was too trivial to be original enough to have copyright protection at all, or else that there are only a few ways to express the idea, and the merger doctrine applies. But if neither o those were true, this might be an infringement. [* To be coninued*]
To use an API over a network connection (as opposed to, e.g., the Windows API), a user communicates a request to the API host, or server, and awaits a response. The host of the remote API can refuse to serve requests from users for probably any reason. Such services often require users to accept a license as a condition of using the service, and they may charge a fee as a condition of the license. A license to use a service is obviously not necessarily bound to a license for the use of its source code, just as the ability to reach the service is not dependent on the ability to see (let alone use) the code in any format, whether it be the source code or some compiled form of the code. In essence, source licenses and service licenses have different primary goals, at least inasmuch as the source license seeks to restrict someone who has actual physical access to compiled code, and possibly source code. Service licenses do not have that concern, though I have seen service licenses that also prohibit decompiling. This is probably the result of a CYA attitude among lawyers: the language is already in the standard software license text, and it doesn't hurt anything to leave it in, and it could help if a service user somehow managed to download the program code.
If you buy a house, you can generally rent out a room in the house, unless in that jurisdiction there is some law against renting rooms in houses (that's actually a condition in my neighborhood, one widely ignored). If it's legal to rent (lease) a room, it is generally legal to sub-lease that room – as long as that's allowed under the original lease contract. I have never heard of a jurisdiction that has a blanket prohibition against subleases. So as far as the actual question goes, the answer is, "yes". The links are about something a different, namely rent control law in San Francisco, and the question of whether a tenant can be evicted from a rent-controlled unit because the owner wants to move in to the unit. Owner move-in eviction requires a specific procedure for giving notice, and the links are about these requirements. Conceivably, though, the question could be whether a person can buy a house that is being rented out, do a proper owner move-in eviction, and then lease a spare room. The SF rent laws require a good faith intent to move in and use as the primary residence for 3 years, and nothing prohibit subsequently leasing a room. Those laws pertain to evictions, not re-rentals. (It should be noted that once eviction under section 37.9(a)(8) has been carried out on a unit in a building, no other unit in the building can ever be so recovered. That could mean that the room in the house could never again be recovered, if it is considered to be a separate "unit" from the "unit" that is the whole house).