Can freelancers publish code in GitHub and claim it to be theirs? I am curious to know the legal process of a collaborated effort for a code at a small startup. Say I am the technical head of a startup, and I have about 90% of the code/commits. The other 10% is by temporary employees, interns, freelancers, etc. For the sake of this story, I will call one freelancer Alan. For a particular project, Alan was given read access to a private repository, and write access to his branch. What prevents Alan from copying our private code and pasting it on GitHub as his own 'published work', essentially granting him copyright over our work? We could show git logs as proof that we had access to the code before he arrived, but git logs are easy to modify, and histories can be rewritten. On GitHub, say Alan uses his signed keys, removes the entire git history and makes a commit with the final state of our whole codebase as his 'Initial Commit'. What legal standing do we have (or proof) if we have not made Alan sign any documents specifically saying he is not allowed to publish our code anywhere (but we also haven't signed any document saying he IS allowed to publish our code). Updates: There has been some discussion, so I would like to ask a more concrete question. Is it proof enough that Alan posted the code at a given time first(which was verified through something like Github's signature on the commit) that I cannot file for a copyright?(since he has published his code and gotten it verified, but we did not used 3rd party signed commits)
Provided you are in one of the 170+ countries signatory to the Berne Convention (the current 10 non-signatories are, exhaustively: Eritrea, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, San Marino, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan), then copyright comes into existence at the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium, not when it is published. The initial copyright owner is the author of the work. In cases of employment, the "author" might be the natural person who authored the work, or the corporate person who employed the natural author. To clarify your thinking about registration: copyright registration is a public record of authorship (or copyright ownership). Registration does not create a copyright, but is merely a recording of the copyright that was automatically created at the moment of original authorship. Depending on circumstances and jurisdiction, Alan might have a legitimate claim to copyright on his own work. However, he will be quite hard-pressed to find a convincing theory of law that allows him to publish the unpublished copyrighted work of other people without their permission. This leaves him either to admit defeat -- he cannot possibly own the copyright of his coworkers' code, so he cannot have legally reproduced it -- or else make the baldfaced lie that the code has no other authors other than Alan himself. For your company to disprove such a claim, you may employ sworn testimony of your coworkers, you may employ code analysis to show differing coding styles (suggestive of multiple authors), or you may show code backups or version control history showing the progressive authorship of the work over time by many people. (Sure, a Git history is possible to fake, but a realistic history with feature branches, "whoops, undid the typo in the last commit" messages, etc. would lend significant weight to your company being the original authors.)
To do so I used some images and Gifs which may be under copyright but since I don't earn money for myself and there is no company backing me I was hoping that there is some protection for private persons like me who just want to showcase the project. Sorry. If your website is public facing (i.e. not password protected and available only to family and close friends), you need to follow copyright law. There is no exception to copyright just because a project is run by an individual for non-commercial purposes. I am also insecure about the GDPR regulations since I give users the ability to create an account and try it out. Your profile says you're in the EU. Then you need to comply with the GDPR. Is there any way to protect me against greedy lawyers and companies? Could I write something like: "This website is a peace of art" and save myself with arguments like "artistic freedom" or "free speech"? Nope. A controversial website run by Peter Sunde had at one point a "free speech" disclaimer (similar to the one you propose) posted. However, Sunde did never use this defense in court: Finnish court slaps Peter Sunde with €350k fine. If he had shown up in court, I am pretty sure the court would have told him that such a disclaimer has no legal merit. The only protection that will make you completely safe is to adhere to the law.
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.
One cannot use the works of others unless one of the following applies: The copyright holder has given permission, usually in the form of a license, often explicit, but sometimes implied. The work is not protected by copyright. This can happen in several ways, but the most common is that the work is old enough that copyright has expired. In the US, works older than 1927 are currently out of copyright. So are some others, the rules are a bit complex. In many countries, if the author or creator died more than 70 years ago, the work is out of copyright. In some countries this is a different number, between 50 and 100 years. This is not likely to apply to a file distributed with current software. If an exception to copyright applies. In the US this would most likely be fair use. In the UK it would probably be fair dealing. In other countries there are a variety of exceptions that might apply, including personal use in some. AS a comment by Jen points out &quot;use&quot; here refers only to those rights protected by copyright, such as making and distributing copied, making nd distributing derivative works, and the like. (Displaying and publicly performing seem unlikely to apply.) Now lets consider the specific situation, and which if any of the reasons for lawful use might apply. License or other permission. There is no explicit license. Since the program is distributed to be run, there is an implicit license to make the sort of use of the file needed to run the program. If the documentation describes how to employ the file as part of running the program, there is almost surely an implied license to employ it in that way. There is not, however, permission to make copies unless that is needed to run the program. There is surely not permission to make derivative works of the file or distribute copies to others, even if you do not charge anything. Expired copyright This pretty clearly will not apply. Fair use This might apply, or might not. There isn't enough info in the question to tell, not even to make a good guess. If any use would be non commercial, that helps fair use a bit. If the use would be for a different purpose than the one the developers used it for, that helps fair use a lot. If the use of the file harmed the market for the program, or served as a substitute, that lean against fair use. without knowing what the file is, what it does, and how it might be used, one really cannot weven guess.
If the code is unrelated to your employment you own the copyright no matter if it is written in Visual Studio, on a piece of paper or tattooed on your butt. In the same way a sculptor owns the copyright in their sculpture even if they use someone else's chisel. Using Visual Studio in this way may, however, violated your contract with your employer and/or their contract with Microsoft. Why go there? Visual Studio Community is free.
You ask permission, preferably with legal counsel to handle the details. It really is that simple. Unsurprisingly, most companies don't want to give their code away- especially to a competitor. If you even get a response, they will expect something in return i.e. money. Realistically though, it's unlikely they will respond, much less deal with you.
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?
Company B has created a derived work from company A's copyright-protected work, so yes, B has infringed on A's copyright. It might be difficult for A to prove it, however, so B might get away with it, but it's still infringement. On the other hand, if B creates software that behaves like A's through reverse engineering, that is, by examining the program's function without examining its code, then they will not have infringed the copyright in the code.