Hosting One time pad of copyrighted material Hosting copyrighted material without permission is illegal in most countries. However, what happens if two independent websites host seemingly random data, which combined (by XOR-ing) form a stream of copyrighted material? The idea is rather simple, someone has digital copyrighted material, the digital form might be 011001 (CR). He then creates a random string of binary digits, for example 010111 (XOR1) and XORs the copyrighted material with the original, resulting in 001110 (XOR2). Both XOR1 and XOR2 seem random and unrelated to CR, but when XOR-ed, they form CR. Now this person anonymously uploads XOR1 and XOR2 to independent hosts, and publishes links to both on a third independent forum. I would assume the anonymous person violates the copyright, but do any of the three hosts do so as well? Can the copyright holder force the removal of XOR1 or XOR2, since for neither XOR1 nor XOR2 it is provable that it is derived from CR and independently both look random. Moreover, is the post on the forum illegal, as it describes how to get the copyrighted material, but doesn't host it itself? I am curious about this w.r.t. either Dutch or US law.
It infringes the copyright. It can easily be proved that both XOR1 and XOR2 derive from the source work by XOR-ing the streams with each other. It's just like any encrypted copy: it infringes the copyright, but only those who can decrypt it are in a position to know that it infringes the copyright. The posts on the forum are illegal because they infringe the copyright; it doesn't matter that they are derived works rather than the work itself, just as your drawing of a copyright-protected image infringes copyright because it is a derived work without being the work itself.
If it was illegal to make the entire copy, it is illegal to copy half the file. See also, e.g., Basic Books v. Kinko's Graphics Corp., 758 F. Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y. 1991) In response to the question of whether moving it to someone else's servers makes a difference: it is the act of copying, not the possession of the copy, that is the violation of copyright law. As for the copy a service assists someone to make, contributory liability would be the issue. You don't need to be the person making the copies to be contributing to the infringement--material contribution to the copying process and knowledge of infringement run a serious risk of creating contributory liability. If seriously considering such a service as a business model someone would need to consult a copyright expert with technical knowledge or pay counsel with technical knowledge for a good bit of time to do some research. There are major civil and criminal consequences if the industry or the government decides to go after a service doing this, so legal expenses would be a significant and important cost of doing business that would significantly increase barriers to entry. In addition, the service would likely be in violation of its agreement with storage vendors, who would want to minimize their legal exposure and might well discontinue the service when they learned what it was doing.
Udemy claims that all the videos and course content are copyrighted, but does that also hold for the material of the course? Yes, all the material is copyrighted. Ideas are not, material and content is. it would be really useful to me if I could take a large part of that code ... I want to know if I am allowed, by the law, to use this code for commercial purposes, or is it protected as the intellectual property? Yes, it is protected, specifically it has copyright applied and you may only use it if the license it is distributed under allows you to - in some cases this may be a permissive license, or the code may be obtainable legitimately from another source under a permissive license, in which case its usable. But in many cases, it may not be distributed under a permissive license or indeed any license, and in such cases you will not be permitted to use it. The license under which the code is released depends on the individual course, and in many cases the source code repository or download site for the code for the course. Check their for a license.
The only real recourse you have is to contact the webhost and try to convince them your content is really yours and file a DMCA Takedown request. How you convince them might be an issue; do you have any old screenshots? Original photos? Any proof that the content and photos are yours? The webhost appears to be https://datacamp.co.uk/ , unless the DNS is being proxied, since DNS points to CloudDNS https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=dns:marksmayo.com NZ and UK are members of the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, so there don't appear to be any arguments about not applying copyright law. You willingly gave up the domain, so you have no recourse or valid reason to try and regain ownership of the domain. You could try and contact the new owner of the domain by filing a complaint via the abuse email listed by the domain registar at https://www.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?&amp;domain=marksmayo.com But they may not do anything, even if you can prove a copyright violation, since they only handle the domain registration and not the webhosting. How they got the content is another question: who was your webhost when you owned the site? Datacamp? Did they not delete it when you closed your account? How did the new owner come to get it?
I realize there's already an answer, but I'd like to go into more detail. There are generally two kinds of open source software licenses: permissive and copyleft (the latter sometimes called viral). Both are intended to allow people to freely use, modify, and redistribute a work while ensuring the original author gets credit. This contrasts with releasing your work into the public domain, which would allow anyone do literally anything, even claim to be the author. The difference is that permissive licenses allow you to re-license your derivative works however you like, while copyleft licenses require your derivatives to be licensed under the same license (hence the term viral). The reasons you'd choose either one are philosophical and political and beyond the scope of this answer. Both the Apache License and the MIT license are permissive, so incorporating MIT licensed code into your Apache licensed project is certainly allowed. Just be sure to attribute the original author for the parts your incorporated and include a copy of the MIT License terms, as required by the license. Go ahead and read it to make sure you get all the details right; it's fairly short and easy for a layperson to comprehend.
Yes That is very simple - copyright is an exclusive right that starts automatically with the creation of a copyrightable work. The default situation is that the author has an exclusive rights to make copies of the work and derivative works. If the code is published somewhere by the author but the author has not said anything about its licence or copyrights, then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. They have the right to just publish it somewhere, others don't. If you try to contact the author and they don't say anything and ignore you, then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. If it's impossible to find the author (e.g. I have certain cases with literary works where it's not clear who inherited the rights after the author died), then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. That being said, certain forms of reuse (recreating ideas, learning from them, etc) would not be a copyright violation. But in general the situation with the author not saying anything is almost the same as the author explicitly stating "all rights reserved, you're not allowed to do anything, violators will be shot" - some specific uses are allowed even against author's wishes (e.g. 'fair use' clauses) but everything that needs their permission really does need their explicit permission.
The words "proprietary format" are important. Are you sure the format is proprietary? If it is, then it's likely protected in which case they might have grounds to sue (but that does not mean they would definetly win). If the format is not proprietary, and so long as you don't share data which is proprietary then I believe you fine. I'm not a lawyer - but I cite GIF files as an example. They were still protected by the US and some other countries until at least the late 90s and there were various threats to open source linux companies who shared code that used the file format. I'm not aware of anything other than threats and never heard of any company being sued, let alone winning or losing. Another example that comes to mind is the RedHat ISO format. My understanding is RedHat could not stop anyone from sharing open source, but they could prevent folks from sharing the format they assembled and shared the open source. Again, I am not sure if it was ever tested in any court of law anywhere.
People running web servers are generally liable for contributory culpability, when some user breaks the law by putting the material on the server. There are legal mechanisms for relieving the server guy from this burden. The best-known mechanism is "DMCA takedown", where you publish contact information so that an offended person can serve up a proper legal claim that you are distributing material that they own copyright to. If you follow the rules, you may enjoy "safe harbor" protection against contributory liability: one of the requirements is that you have to take infringing material down. The specific requirements can depend on the nature of the liability and jurisdiction, but generally involves a "hands off" involvement where the person has no knowledge of what's going on on his server. So just disclaiming responsibility does not work. There are other more serious violations, such as distribution of child porn or transmission of top secret information. Jurisdiction is not totally central to internet questions, and I could sue you (the server guy) in US courts, or (depending on the offense: copyright infringement of a particular item) in UK courts. Nailing this down specifically to Sweden is harder, but recall that The Pirate Bay had a whopping judgment against them.