Lawyer says bumping software’s minor version would cost $2k to “refile” copyright paperwork. Is this typical? I work at a small company as a software engineer. I have very little knowledge of copyright law, so forgive me for my naïveté. Recently, my company started filing paperwork and handing over several versions of our application’s source code to a lawyer so that we can… I don’t know, be protected by filing for a copyright? I am not directly involved with the copyright discussions, so my understanding is all secondhand. Our software uses a 4-part version number: {major}.{minor}.{autogenerated}.{autogenerated} The major version is pretty locked in at “2”, while the minor gets manually bumped periodically when new significant features get added. We were told by the lawyer that if we bump from “2.4…” to “2.5…” that they would have to refile the copyright or whatever, and that just doesn’t quite pass the smell test to me. Is the copyright really that fragile? Do all companies have to pay $2k (what the lawyer quoted us) to refile anytime they want to bump their minor version numbers? Just wondering if y’all can tell me if this is the norm or if we should push back/not worry about “refiling”.
The cost of filing a copyright for an updated filing would generally be the same as the original one. The amount of work isn't much different and there are good reasons why every new version of software sold on a large volume commercial basis should always have a new copyright registration for a new version of the software, which are essentially the same reasons you copyright the original version of the software in the first place. As noted by @DavidSiegel in a comment: A work is protected the moment it is &quot;fixed in tangible form&quot;, but one cannot sue for infringement unless the work is already registered under 17 USC 411. Statutory damages, often important, are not available unless the work is registered before the infringement occurs, or within 3 months of publication, under 17 USC 412. $2,000 is on the high side for the work in the Colorado market where I do most of my work, but it isn't unheard of or terribly beyond the norm. I can think of at least five plausible and defensible reasons for a fairly high charge for a fairly simple job. This said, sometimes people just charge more than the going rate for work for no good reason, and in a free market, people are allowed to do that, at the risk that someone will go to the competition instead at some point. One reason: value billing Many lawyers do that kind of work on a flat fee basis, spreading the significant costs they incur in putting together an efficient system over many cases. They can do the work efficiently but want to charge a rate competitive only with lawyers who aren't so efficient and have to figure things out from scratch each time. A second possible reasons: diseconomies of scale Part of what may be going on is that if you have a big bureaucratic law firm, there are significant firm wide costs to every new matter (which, for example, has to be cleared through a conflict check firm-wide and involves quite a few administrative set up costs), especially if the firm charges high hourly rates. In firms with those kinds of economics, even a project that only takes two hours at $400+ per attorney hour to do the core legal work, would be hard for the firm to make a profit on, because there might easily be $1,200 in anticipated setup and shut down, and tail case monitoring costs. While some of those costs could, in theory, be streamlined when doing repeat work like the job suggested in the question, large or high cost bureaucratic firms aren't necessarily bothered to provide discounts in those circumstances to repeat customers because they see that kind of job as nickel and dime work that distracts them from working on their core competency of high-end big litigation cases, and big transactions like mergers of medium and large sized companies. It would probably be possible for a small, more nimble firm that doesn't see this kind of job as a distraction to get the fee for this down to $500-$1000. This cost issue with small transactional matters is one of the reasons that it is quite common to see the intellectual property department of large firms break off from the large firm bureaucracy (I recall it taking immense efforts just to requisition new office supplies when I worked in one because there was so much red tape involved), to form vastly smaller &quot;boutique&quot; intellectual property speciality law firms (e.g. 5-25 lawyers breaking off from a 100-500+ lawyer law firm) to prevent that kind of cost creep for smaller matters. The economics of high end intellectual property transactional work is different than a lot of big law firm work because a lot of intellectual property transactional work is high volume, low dollar transactions for repeat clients, which makes the friction associated with big law firm bureaucracies outweigh their benefits. A third possible reason: price for this job doesn't matter much in the context of a larger attorney-client relationship On the other hand, if you have a big company that normally uses a big inefficient law firm for its work (since most of its legal work involves life or death of the company grade issues where winning is much more important than keeping legal fees to a minimum), and it has a low volume of intellectual property filings, it may be more efficient for that big company to simply pay a bit more than it could if it really tries to get its costs down to a bare minimum, to just continue to use its regular law firm for this bit of work. The cost of vetting an alternative law firm may not be worth it for a big company. Bidding out the small project might save a few thousand dollars a year of legal fees, but if the big company normally has hundreds of thousands of dollars a year of legal fees anyway, this may not be a big deal for that big company client. A fourth possible reason: a bigger ability to make malpractice right Also, keep in mind that if the software has very high economic value, a big part of your $2000 flat legal fee for the work may be paying for the malpractice policy to make the client whole in the unlikely but inevitable event for a screwed up filing that has high stakes to the client in the rare cases where it happens. For example, I recall a malpractice case my office once handled where a big firm failed to file a key document in the real estate records resulting in a $20 million dollar mortgage losing its priority when the borrower default on the loan made by the client due to a miscommunication between a junior lawyer and a paralegal over who was going to get that job done that resulted in neither person doing it. This resulted in an immense loss to the client (they only recovered about $2 million and would have recovered the full amount if this document had been filed on time as the law firm agreed it would). It doesn't happen often, but it happens. In the same vein, if your software product generates $20 million a year in revenues and a small, lower charging firm screws up in a way that materially impairs the copyright protection available for that product (e.g. causing statutory damages to be unavailable when large statutory damages would otherwise almost surely have been awarded), a small law firm's malpractice policy and the responsible lawyer's assets may not even begin to cover the harm done, but a big law firm's malpractice policy, which is far more expensive and makes everything that the big law firm does much more expensive to clients, might easily be able to cover that loss. A fifth possible reason: the lawyer is reluctant to do the work An alternative explanation is that the lawyer could do the work, but isn't really bothered to do it unless its very lucrative, since the lawyer sees it as a distraction or just doesn't like you as a client. If this is the reason, then the lawyer is setting a high charge to encourage you to go elsewhere, without saying anything that would cause you to lose face or that would damage the long term lawyer-client relationship in a future case that is bigger or more in the usual vein of the work that the lawyer is looking to do going forward.
You probably own the copyright, since this wasn't an explicit part of your job. However, there may be other legal reasons which preclude you from using them anyway; copyright isn't all there is. Since you are in the middle of an active dispute, you should consult an actual lawyer (which I am certainly not) for legal advice.
You'll want to read the actual licenses yourself and understand what is required. If you don't understand, then you'll want to consult an attorney. But neither of these licenses are all that complex in my opinion. MIT: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Apache 2.0: Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions: (a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and (b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and (c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and (d) If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License. Nowhere does either license require you to publish your application's source code, even if your application is directly based on the original code.
If you aren't including those libraries, then yes because it's entirely your own work. If you are publishing those libraries, then no because their licenses will limit how you can do that. GPL's and MIT's main features are restricting how you can distribute software that includes the licensed code, and they don't allow the &quot;do whatever you want&quot; of public domain.
No-ish, it is not. The relevant sticking point would be in their DMCA takedown notice, where they have to follow 17 USC 512(c)(3)(A) and include in their notice (v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. (vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. The key here is having a "good faith belief". There is a credible scenario where a company A could file multiple notices for the actually same material B posted by the exact same person C, where the person has the right to post that material, and do so in good faith. If A was not able to locate evidence of the permission to C, then they would shift the burden of proof to C – "good faith belief" doesn't mean that they have to be right, just that they have to actually think they are. If C also uses the name D, A would not be able to determine that the work was licensed to D based on the fact (once they know that) that it is licensed to C. DMCA abuse is not an permanently open escape hatch. 17 USC 512(4) states Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it. See Automattic Inc. v. Steiner, 82 F. Supp. 3d 1011. The ruling judge found that "Defendant could not have reasonably believed that the Press Release he sent to Hotham was protected under copyright". The appeal court drew on precedent and dictionary to fill in gaps w.r.t. "good faith belief", that the person should have known if it acted with reasonable care or diligence, or would have had no substantial doubt had it been acting in good faith, that it was making misrepresentations In this case, the abuser was flagrantly abusing the takedown system, and there is some reason to believe that in the instant case, the abuser had actual knowledge of non-infringement. Rossi v. Motion Picture Association of America provides an alternative outcome. In this case, Rossi operated a website that appeared (note the word appear) to offer free downloads of movies, and the rights-holder MCAA filed a takedown notice. In fact, it did not offer any such downloads, but MCAA's investigation stopped prematurely. This court held that "good faith belief" is subjective, so Rossi did not prevail. It is no doubt crucial that Rossi actually counted on his customers thinking that you could get actual downloads of protected material. Whether or not a DMCA abuse suit would succeed would depend very much on the factual details of why the material is not infringing, and how easily the rights-holder could know that there was no infringement.
The lack of a copyright notice is irrelevant, what matters is whether permission is granted. The material cannot be copied, except if the copyright holder grants you permission to copy. However, you might be able to create something legal and satisfactory on your own, because the underlying ideas are not protected. By way of analogy, you cannot copy the Turbo Pascal Numeric Methods library without permission, but you can study the logic of a module and write your own FFT routine. The status of something as &quot;declaring code&quot; is entirely irrelevant to the court's decision in Google v. Oracle. What is relevant to the court's finding of fair use is that the content constituted 0.4 percent of the entire API, and the fact that the copied lines of code are inextricably bound to other lines of code that are accessed by programmers, allowing programmers to bring their skills to a new environment. The court found that he amount of copying was tethered to a valid, and transformative, purpose.
If you own the copyright (because you wrote the book), you can do whatever you want with it. If someone else has the copyright, you have to get their permission to do what you propose. That could be the author, the author's estate, or some other party. It then depends on what the interest of the rights-holder is: they could say "No way!", "Sure, for a payment of $100,000", "At $1 per copy, here is how you must keep track of copies", "Okay, as long as you include this notice that prevents further re-distribution" or "Huh, I never thought of that. Sure, I grant you complete license to do whatever you want". A publisher is relevant only when the publisher requires a transfer of copyright to the publishing company, or if the rights-holder has granted them a certain type of license (e.g. an exclusive license). If the author has granted someone else an exclusive perpetual right to distribute, then they cannot also grant you a license to distribute for free. That is really the author's problem, though, since the publisher doesn't hold the copyright so can't sue you, instead the publisher would sue the author for breach of contract.
Sure, you can. But if you, from the US, contract with and pay someone outside the US and then use the results of that effort - the reverse-engineered code, either directly in violation of copyright or to find workarounds - within the US, you may not be culpable in a criminal sense (depending on different jurisdictions and trade/IP agreements), but you certainly would be liable in a civil sense. If the US based software developer (I assume a US-based software company, as you said "outside the US") tracks you down, they can open a civil action against you for any damages they want to claim, including theft of IP, loss of profits, EULA violations, and on and on, because you posses and are using reverse engineered code. How much money do you have to lose?