Non-profit granting rights of use of software to for-profit we have two organizations - one for profit and one non-profit, that are related. The Non-profit benefits from use of Slack, GSuite and other tools at a discount due to the non-profit nature of the organization. The for profit organization is donating resource time, office space to the non-profit. In this case, would the non-profit be allowed to 'license' the use of the SaaS to the for profit (in exchange for the office space, resources, technical help, etc)? I imagine that the main problem would be in the T&amp;C of these tools (Slack/Gsuite for non profits, etc), but could not find anything myself. Thanks! Brian
You can't grant or license that which is not yours. For example, the Slack terms of service say: We grant to Customer a non-sublicensable, non-transferable, non-exclusive, limited license for Customer and its Authorized Users to use the object code version of these components, but solely as necessary to use the Services and in accordance with the Contract and the User Terms. So Slack's agreement with Org A does not give A any right to let any other organization B use the software. It does not matter how A and B are related, nor whether B is nonprofit or for-profit, nor what A would be getting in exchange. If B wants to use it, they need to make their own agreement with Slack.
The notification that you saw is not useful legal information for you: stuff always belongs to whoever owns the stuff. It might be interpreted as saying "it doesn't belong to us", but you can't count on that (it's virtually guaranteed that at least some of the content there is owned by the website owner). A more informative statement would be "You will have to get permission from the content owner to copy their stuff", and "We're not going to spend time figuring out who owns what". You could read the terms of service (try this with Stack Exchange) to see what the site tells people. The TOS here says that if you contribute anything, it "is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license". You can then look up what that license says and learn what that allows. Websites are kind of tricky, though, because it's not hard to change the wording of a TOS, and you need to know what specific TOS was promulgated at the time a particular contribution was unleashed. Usual practice is to think it through carefully and not frequently tweak the TOS, but it's not illegal to change the TOS. Note that copyright law does not prohibit you from using other people's stuff, it prohibits you from copying. The distinction is clearer when you see a post that explains an algorithm with actual code, you read and learn and make use of that, but write your own code. As a user out there, if there isn't a clear indication that stuff posted is there for the taking, under some public license (as is the case with SE), then getting specific permission to copy, from the owner of the content (possibly untraceable), would be necessary. Now assume that you're a moderator or site-owner of some forum: presumably (hopefully) you have a TOS that addresses that situation, which says that moderators have the right to edit or delete content at their sole discretion, and also you say what kinds of posts are prohibited. Such an statement is not absolutely mandatory for all things, but it may be necessary to avoid litigation over some acts. One one end of the spectrum, it would be illegal for a forum to host child porn, stolen credit card numbers, or protected digital content. If a user were to post such stuff, the site would need to eliminate that stuff, and the poster could not legally rely on an argument of the type "That's my stuff, you have no right to mess with it". On the other hand, if a forum actually requires paid membership, then there may be a strong contractual expectation that the user is getting something of value, so you would have to watch for statements that could be interpreted as broad permission to put stuff out there without any interference. (For instance, a file-hosting service would have only minimal restrictions on content, aimed at protecting their own legal interests; whereas a political-advocacy site would have maximal interest in prohibiting the expression of views counter to the cause). Thus the SE TOS has you "grant Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works", which allows moderators to correct typos, delete offensive wording, and obliterate entire posts. If a site fails to have any such clauses in their TOS, then it might be a matter that has to be settled in court, whether they have the right to eliminate "spam" (i.e. advertising for a service, especially if the reason for getting an account was to provide an advertising platform). In light of the limited use sanctioned by the TOS, per the below comment, legal copying will be quite limited. However, "fair use" a situation where copying is allowed, regardless of what the TOS may say. (You could be banned from the site, but you could not be sued for infringement). Fair use was invented precisely so that people could make comments like "Jones advocates an absurd law, saying '...[quote from Jones]...'". Thus you can comment on a post and quote the relevant part ("The lines '[... quoting the code ...]' results in an infinite loop"). See the Fair Use FAQ for more details.
In the EU, software license resale is legal, even if explicitly forbidden by terms of any EULA or other contract imposed upon the parties. To quote the European Court of Justice's press release on its ruling in a case in Germany between Oracle and a German reseller, An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his `used' licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet. [...] The principle of exhaustion of the distribution right applies not only where the copyright holder markets copies of his software on a material medium (CD-ROM or DVD) but also where he distributes them by means of downloads from his website. Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy – tangible or intangible – and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right. Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy. Therefore, even if the license agreement prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy. There are many such companies in the EU who resell software legally, including used OEM Windows licenses that are far cheaper than retail copies. This is, in my opinion, a fantastic thing -- but undoubtedly has been behind the trend towards time-limited licenses rather than perpetual ones, which we all arguably suffer from today.
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.
If an infringement suit is filed, the plaintiff(s) would have rights of discovery. They could subpoena the source code in such a case for comparison. They could take the depositions of EvilCorp's developers and ask them about the libraries that they used. There might well be other ways to achieve the same effect.
The second paragraph is an invitation for people who don't want to follow the terms of the GPL (e.g. who want to incorporate it into a larger closed-source work, or make closed-source modifications) to contact XXX for a less onerous (but more expensive) license. That would require that XXX have full rights to the software, that they did not for instance incorporate others' GPLed code. It would be a stretch to read the second paragraph as attempting to limit the first paragraph, particularly given the &quot;please&quot;.
Probably Not The creator or owner of a piece of software does not in general have any copyright over the output when others run the software, unless that output is itself a derivative work of input supplied by the copyright owner, or forming part of the software. In this case the translation is a derivative work of the 19th century original, but that is assumed to be in the public domain. SAo google has no copyright on the resulting translation. But copyright protection is only available for &quot;original works of authorship&quot;. (See 17 USC 102 in the US, and similar laws elsewhere.) A machine-produced translation is not an original work, and it is surely not then work of the author of the overall book. However, the author would still have a copyright on the book as a whole. The legal situation is no different than if the author had simply quoted a 19th century work. One may incorporate public domain works into a later work, and that later work is still protected by copyright, provided that there is enough original contentr to make the work as a whole &quot;an original work of authorship&quot;. Others may use the PD [arts, or the original from which they are taken, but not the rest of the work (beyond what fair use would allow in any case). For example, I have made a number of posts here on LAW.SE. In several,of those I quoted sections from one of the numbers of The Federalist. That 19th century work is in the public domain. Anyone else may re-quote the passages I quoted from it. But that gives them no rights to use the rest of my work, except as the CC-BY-SA license or fair use permits. So the author would retain copyright on the book as a whole. But soemoen who merely quotes or uses the translated 19th century article but none of the original parts of the book would not be infringing that copyright. I say probably in the header, because I do not have any actual case-law to cite here. It is possible that some court has rules otherwise on the subject of the copyright on the output of a software tool, but I strongly doubt it.
Probably not An employee is someone that the employer "suffers or permits to work" - moderators would appear to be caught by this. There are specific exemptions carved out in the public and not-for-profit sectors where they "a) work toward public service, religious or humanitarian objectives; b) not expect or receive compensation for services; and c) not displace any genuine employees." However, they very specifically say “Under the FLSA, employees may not volunteer services to for-profit private sector employers.” So on the face of it, a moderator is an employee and is entitled to minimum wages and conditions for the hours they work. AOL settled a lawsuit in 2009 with their moderators who were suing for wages for an undisclosed sum and so the case did not set a precedent. This article suggests that "for-profit companies don’t have volunteers; they have lawsuits waiting to happen" and uses examines the situation at Reddit (which could equally apply here). Facebook employs moderators so the precedent exists that this is work that employees do. When the lawsuit happens, we'll find out. It will turn on the particular facts - some types of mods for some companies may be employees while others may not.