Can a copyright holder legally remove another holder from license copyright, then expand it to all contributors? The original author of a MIT-licensed project &quot;merged&quot; a large set of changes I authored, which included an addition of my name to the copyright line of the license. Later on, the original author removed my name, because we had a disagreement and he decided my name shouldn't be there since he never explicitly authorized the addition. The catch is that, although he removed my name, he added &quot;all contributors&quot; to the copyright line. Is the removal of my name legal? edit: I should also note that the original author acknowledged me as co-author of the project after my large contribution (I have historical proof of this).
The MIT License (as distributed by OSI) does not include an attribution requirement beyond the requirement to include the copyright notice in any re-distributed copy including derivative works. The same is true of the description of the license as described in the Wikipedia article. If you sent back to the maintainer a modified version including your own contributions with an MIT license notice and your name in the copyright statement, that is a new work released under that license. The maintainer (or anyone else) may not lawfully use your work or incorporate it into a new derived work without complying with the license terms, which require retaining the copyright notice. By distributing the combined work using a copyright notice not including your name, it would seem that your license is being violated. You could contact the maintainer with a request that your name be included in the notice or your contributions be removed. If that is not accepted, you could use a take-down notice, or file suit. That last would involve significant costs, of course.
It is certainly possible to transfer a copyright or other IP without an explicit charge, indeed it can be a pure gift, and normally would be when it is left by will, as is common enough. From a paid consultant it might be clearer to include a statement that the transfer is part of the consulting assignment, rather than putting a price of zero in a blank. But one could instead convey a permanent non-exclusive license, granting permission to use or modify the work in any way desired, ans saying that this is provided as part of the consulting process. Then there would be no question of what rights the consultant retained, or that the same or a very similar solution could be provided to different clients. Indeed such a license would not be so very different from a CC-BY license, or any of several open source licenses, although I would not use one of those by name. But the legal effect would be much the same, and the wording could be similar. Otherwise there could be a later claim that the right transferred precluded the consultant from using the same solution for other clients. Even if such a claim was not legally sound, and was not upheld, it could be a distraction and costly of time and energy at least.
In general, unless the license contains a clause which allows it to be modified at a later date through some defined means (publication, revocation of existing license etc) then you are free to continue to use the existing version of the software under the original license terms. So make sure you pin your versions! Look out for clauses such as exists in the GPL which allow the recipient of the distributed binary or code to choose what version of the GPL to apply if the original author does not state (GPLv2 Clause 9) as they then allow recipients to bind you, the distributor, to versions you might not agree with (eg the switch to GPLv3 with its patents clauses).
The vendor has available the DMCA safe harbor provisions if you decides to infringe someone else's book – the copyright owner notifies them that they don't have the copyright holder's permission, so they take the book down (independently the copyright owner sues you for infringement). There is a complicated procedure where they contact Amazon, Amazon tell you you've been accused of infringement and they take it down, they you can counter-claim that you have the right to distribute the book, then the owner files a suit against you). If Amazon doesn't comply with the DMCA formalities, they can be sued for contributory infringement. However: the copyright owner is the only person empowered to legally object – simply asserting that a book is &quot;not in the public domain&quot; carries no legal weight. If you are the copyright holder, but someone doesn't like what they can say, they can't do anything about it legally unless what you wrote is defamatory or is &quot;illegal for you to publish&quot; (you publish a fact that you cannot publish under a non-disclosure agreement; it constitutes a gross invasion of privacy...). The &quot;whatever reason&quot; matters very much. The consequence for you is that you will get sues and have to pay a bunch of money, plus the court will probably prevent any further distribution of the book. There are other sanctions in France, which I don't address here, for instance there are laws against publishing racist insults in France that don't exist in the US.
I'm assuming that you are not seeking to change the license, and so it will remain GPLv3. As long as you've built on the original software, that license still applies. You also need to keep the previous copyright notices, including the names of the original people. Assuming that, everything you're doing is legal, which is what's on topic here. There is some etiquette around forks (which is what you're doing), which would be on topic at the Open Source Stack Exchange. I'm puzzled by your desire to have a different license text. You can't change the license from GPLv3, so that has to stay the same. (If the original has GPLv3 "or, at your option, any later version", you can drop the any other version text if you like.)
Course assignments, like practically every other piece of written content created in the past 100 years or so, are copyrighted. You cannot copy or redistribute them without the permission of the copyright holder. In most cases that would be the course instructor, but it could also be the university, or the publisher of a commercial book or other resource where the questions came from. The instructor might be happy to give you permission if you ask - many professors would be pleased to have their creations reach a wider audience. In any case, it is perfectly legal to talk about the assignment you were given, as long as you do not copy or replicate the text of the assignment itself. Reading it verbatim or with trivial alterations would be a problem, but describing it completely in your own words doesn't infringe copyright. A separate issue is what is allowed by your university rules. University rules aren't laws, but you can still be punished academically if you break them (grade penalties, suspension, expulsion, etc). The university might have a policy against sharing, or even discussing, assignments without permission. This might include forbidding actions that the law itself allows. In particular, they might forbid you from talking about your solutions to the assignments, which copyright law would have no problem with (your solution is your own creative work, and the copyright on it belongs to you). So again, ask your instructor what they would allow. Also, academic ethics (which again is not a law, but might be enforced by your university) would generally require that you give proper attribution to the author of the assignment you are discussing. Note that there are plenty of online collections of so-called &quot;open courseware&quot;, where the university deliberately makes their course materials public, under some sort of open license such as Creative Commons. MIT's repository is one of the most famous. So if you can't get permission to use the materials from your Penn State courses, you could always make videos about MIT's assignments instead.
You have misunderstood the MIT license. The MIT license requires you to include a copy of &quot;the above copyright notice and this permission notice&quot; in &quot;all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot; However, this is not the same as requiring you to offer the Software under those terms, and in fact the MIT license explicitly permits you to sublicense the Software under different terms (&quot;including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&quot;). If you had to offer the Software under the same terms, then the sublicense right would be extinguished, so that cannot be the correct reading of the license. Therefore, you can do exactly what you describe, releasing the software under the GPL. In other words, you have to include the permission notice, but you are expressly permitted to wrap it in terms that state &quot;these permissions don't apply to you, dear end user, but only to people who go and download the original from the upstream source.&quot; That's what &quot;sublicense&quot; means. The Free Software Foundation, which publishes the GPL, agrees with this analysis (although they recommend avoiding the phrase &quot;MIT License&quot; because MIT has offered software under other licenses).
Yes. The introduction to the license says &quot;You may adapt — ... build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially&quot;. (My emphasis). Note that there is an attribution requirement so you need to find a way to attribute each image to its individual author. For the fine details, you certainly need to read the actual license (rather than the introduction) and you probably need to consult your own, paid-for, IP lawyer - but if you are just scoping the project out at the moment, you should be fine. For contrast, here is a Creative Commons licence that does prohibit commercial use.