Can Oracle sue JSON users? As we know, Oracle owns the Java and JavaScript trademarks from its purchase of Sun. Java and JavaScript are 2 completely unrelated programming languages. JSON is the abbreviation of &quot;JavaScript Object Notation&quot;, and is a popular format for encoding structured data. Can Oracle sue JSON users? user of parsing softwares, and developers of parsers and encoders, and ECMA, who publishes the JSON specification What can Oracle possibly win (and JSON users possibly lose) in such litigation?
I don't think so. While JSON stands for &quot;JavaScript Object Notation&quot;, it doesn't say that. So the term &quot;JSON&quot; isn't infringing on a trademark for &quot;JavaScript&quot;. To sue somebody because of an alleged trademark infringement, one needs to prove that the offender abused a trade name of the suing company in a way to make the public believe the offending company was related to the suing company. Nobody is even trying that by just using a file format. The file structure itself was developed as an open standard, so they can't claim any rights on that. I have not heard about a company claiming rights in file structures recently, because the data is considered the property of the user, not of the company that wrote the program it was created with. And users are often no longer accepting file formats that can only be read by a specific (expensive) application from a particular company. They want to be flexible to change their vendor and keep the data.
Assumptions Let us assume that the code involved was created during the period of employment, was within the scope of that employment, and was validly work-made-for-hire (WFH). In that case, the code copyright is owned by the former employer.dn the person who wrote it has no more rights than a random stranger would. I am also going to assume US law. Ownership of Ideas Who owns the ideas, the knowledge of how these libraries work? No one does. In the absence of a patent, no one ever &quot;owns&quot; an idea. ]17 USC 102(b)](https://copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#102) provides: (b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. Derivative Works Copyright law does prohibit anyone making a derivative work from a work protected by copyright without the permission of the owner. A derivative work is one &quot;based on&quot; the source work. The classic case is a translation. Exactly when a piece of software is a derivative work of another is fact-dependent. Bu several things are clear. If the source work is trivial and obvious, ther may not be sufficient &quot;originality&quot; for the source work to be protected by copyright at all. If the source work is not protected by a valid copyright, nothing is a derivative work of it. A &quot;hello world&quot; program, for example, is probably not original enough for any copyright. A straight-forward implementation of a basic algorithm like quicksort is probably not original enough, either. If there is only one way, or only a small number of ways, to express the ideas of the source work, the merger doctrine applies. This means that the expression of the work is merged into the idea, leaving the expression unprotected. When the merger doctrine applies, there is, in effect, no copyright. If a work copies ideas from a source, but none of its particular expression of those ideas, the result is not a derivative work, and is not an infringement of copyright. If a work is definitive, but is also a fair use of the source work, it is not an infringement. The usual four-factor fir use analysis must be made to determine this. In particular, if a work is highly transformative, it is likey to be found to be a fair use. Issues from the Question What if the new code (presumably, in the case of something simple) comes out exactly the same (even if I rewrite it without looking)? That Rather suggests that the work was too trivial to be original enough to have copyright protection at all, or else that there are only a few ways to express the idea, and the merger doctrine applies. But if neither o those were true, this might be an infringement. [* To be coninued*]
Wikipedia and you likely have no contract. If you don't have to click "I agree" to access the data, its likely there is no contract. Therefore this is a pure IP law question. The ONLY IP law issue that I see is copyright. The DATA is not subject to copyright. Only the expression of that data. So copying the html and selling that IS potential copyright infringement. Copying the data in some other format and using that is not. Finally, even if you do copy the full html (i.e. full expression), this MAY be licensed by their terms of use (as you suggested they have licensed some content). That is a more particularized legal question that I can't answer here.
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.
The GPL does not explicitly specify a time within which the source code must be provided, which probably means a &quot;reasonable time&quot; is allowed. What is &quot;reasonable&quot; would eventually be evaluated by a court, if the matter ever got that far. But please note that only the copyright holder (or the holder's authorized agent) can sue for infringement. The license does not give other people a right to sue for infringement, and I doubt that any license could grant such a right. One could inform the copyright holder who could sue, but the holder need not sue, and undertaking such a suit would involve expense, time, and effort. Whether the offer to provide the source constitutes a binding agreement is not clear, and may well vary in different jurisdictions. The question does not state any particular jurisdiction.
If you change a single character, that's clearly a partial copy. Copyright protection has a limited extent, however. The protected work must be original and not obvious. For example, there are only so many ways to write a function that computes the average of two numbers, so the copyright owner of one body of code cannot claim infringement by the author of a second body of code simply because they both have a function float Average(float a, float b) { return (a + b) / 2; } A surefire way to avoid infringing copyright is to specify the function of the code and then have someone who has never seen the code write it from scratch. This is sometimes called clean-room engineering. Otherwise, there is no way to answer your question definitively. If you create a modified copy of the code (a "derived work" in copyright terminology), there is no strict formula available to evaluate the extent of the infringement. It comes down to a case-specific analysis of the facts by a judge. Depending on the jurisdiction, which you have not specified, there may be specific laws or judicial precedent that guide the judge, but the determination will still require a specific analysis of the facts. For example, if the alleged infringer raises these arguments, the judge would have to determine how obvious the code is, or whether the copyright claimant even owns the copyright to the code.
Person A has to have created the data to hold copyright; for most kinds of data this has no legal effect because facts are not protected by copyright. A mineable database probably does not have the necessary creative elements for copyright. An algorithm is not protected by copyright (it might be patented). Person C's program is copyrighted. The product created by D is probably copyrighted, depending on what degree of creativity is involved in their transformation. If the transformation is automatic then no, but if creative judgments are applied to the output of the program then maybe. Though the resulting product is another database of facts, and the facts cannot be protected. In terms of "using the model", only C and possibly B have any control. If it is necessary to validate the software using A's data and A has kept the data secret, C might negotiate with A to use the data, in order to complete his program, and that could give A some interest in the program.
Not going to hold up. Dutch Supreme Court confirmed 2012-09-21 in LJN BW6135 that arbitration is still covered by the the right to an independent judge, as established in Golder v UK, ECHR 1975-02-21, nr. 4451/70. Stack Exchange can't decide the rules themselves. (The Dutch case confirms that sector-wide arbitration is in fact legal, with regard to a standard arbitration clause commonly used in the Dutch building sector. The arbiter was found to be independent in that case precisely because they weren't picked by the builder involved.) The GDPR is only indirectly relevant, but the fact that it's mentioned does mean that there is an indisputable intent to provide services to EU consumers. (See section 23 of the GDPR, or its national equivalents). As such, you can't hide behind a US business address. If you intend to do business in the EU, it's under EU laws - all of them. You can't say that only the GDPR applies, and not other rules. I'm having a bit of a problem finding a source, but I'm fairly confident that consumers have the right to sue at their own, local court, overruling the default of suing in the court where the counterparty is located. Finally, I have the right under national law (Dutch: BW 6:236 start and sub-n) to strike the arbitration clause up to 30 days after the conflict arises, and demand a court decision. That's not 30 days after I accept the "Public Network Terms", that's 30 days after the arbitration is invoked. Dutch law explicitly allows arbitration abroad, and arbiters may apply foreign law, but as written the arbitration clause has no legal basis in the Netherlands, and any arbitration resolution would therefore not be considered valid. You may wonder if it matters to Stack Exchange that the arbitration decision would not hold in the EU. Well, consider a clause like Indemnification, which demands the user indemnifies Stack Exchange. That's a pretty empty demand if it's not enforceable.