Software licence where no licence is found Is it correct that I can't take the source code from an educational book and write/use in my website or use it for my own teaching purposes? Or can such code be considered "generic code" without copyright e.g. basic examples of what is new in Java 8 and the study code for Java 8 in the study guide from Oracle. It would surprise me if I could do what I want with the code, and it would also surprise me if I'm forbidden to use the code, especially if I improve the code and put it in an executable context (now the code is just printed on the page in snippets and never in an executional environment). Same question for computer science books, I suppose sometimes there is a licence found in computer science books for the source code, and sometimes we may use the source any way we like. Spec. I'm wondering about the source code in the Java study guides for the Java certificates. I find it cumbersome to use a CD and I would like simple HTMLforms with the code to practice and even run the examples where I can and step thru the code examples with a debugger if/when I don'e understand.
Written down computer code is subject to copyright. If you do not have the permission of the owner to copy it you are breaching their copyright unless your use constitutes fair use/dealing.
Your understanding of the GPL is a bit off. GPLed code doesn't generally force you to GPL the output of the program, but that's just because the output of the program is normally not a derivative work of the program. For instance, if you write a novel in Emacs, your novel is an entirely original work. The fact that you used Emacs as a tool doesn't mean that your novel is somehow based on Emacs. This generator is different. It generates sprites by putting together art assets made by the program's creator. That means that the output contains a substantial amount of content made by the program creator, which means that it would likely be covered by the program creator's copyright. If the content was licensed to you under the GPL, you normally have to abide by GPL restrictions when you redistribute the content or incorporate it into your own program. Copyright holders can, if they want, grant additional permissions to their content and allow you to incorporate that content into nonfree software. For instance, the GCC compilers have an additional permission for their runtime libraries to let you use them in any GCC-compiled code; without that permission, GCC could only be used to compile GPL-compatible code. But unless the copyright holder has granted those permissions, when program output contains large amounts of their copyrighted content you're bound by the GPL when using it. In this case, the program specifically says that the art is dual-licensed under GPLv3 and CC-BY-SA-3.0. Since the generator's output is a combination of premade art assets (the buttons just let you tell the program which art assets to combine), the output is a derivative work of those assets. You can't use it unless your use is compatible with the GPL v3 or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (either works, since dual licensing lets you pick either license).
You need to check what license the library comes with. The fact that you want to create a public domain program doesn't give you any rights to any library. So read the BSD license and see what it tells you whether and how you can use the library. For example, if you used a GPL-licensed library, you could not put your program in the public domain legally.
The Organization Does Not Own the Copyright As you were clearly not an employee of the organization, and did not have a specific contract with them, this was not a &quot;work-made-for-hire&quot; (WFH). Therefore, the copyright initially belonged to the author, in this case the programmer, that is you. That being so, it would require a written document to transfer the copyright to another during your lifetime. In future there should be a written agreement in such a case, spelling out just what rights are to be retained by whom. It can save lots of trouble. The organization would have an implied license to use the software. The terms of this would be defined by the conduct of the parties, and might be a matter of dispute. Probably there would be a non-exclusive license without any fee or ending date. Probably there would be no license to distribute to others unless you explicitly grant one. Specific US Laws 17 USC 101 defines a WFH: A “work made for hire” is— (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a “supplementary work” is a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an “instructional text” is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities. (emphasis added) 17 USC 201 provides that: (a) Initial Ownership. — Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work. The authors of a joint work are coowners of copyright in the work. (b) Works Made for Hire. — In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright. ... (d) Transfer of Ownership.— (d) (1) The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law, and may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property by the applicable laws of intestate succession. (d) (2) Any of the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, including any subdivision of any of the rights specified by section 106, may be transferred as provided by clause (1) and owned separately. The owner of any particular exclusive right is entitled, to the extent of that right, to all of the protection and remedies accorded to the copyright owner by this title. 17 USC 204 provides that: (a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent.
The problem is that open source licenses incl AGPL have legal force because copyright prevents copying + modifying software by default (software is treated as a “literary work” and therefore enjoys copyright protection). But copyright on datasets and ML models is very different – if it is even recognized at all. Thus, similar copyleft techniques would only work in particular jurisdictions. For example, the EU recognizes “database rights”. A copyleft license that accounts for this is CC-BY-SA-4.0, meaning that in an EU context, databases based on the original database would have to use the same license. However, database rights are not recognized in the US (facts are not copyrightable, and the “sweat of the brow” doctrine is not recognized). Thus, the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license would not have any copyleft effect with respect to databases in an US context. Independently of copyright in the database as a whole, the data in the database might be copyrighted material, for example if the database contains text or images, complicating matters further. Machine learning models derived from a data set are much more difficult. Clearly, ML models that have been trained are not a creative work and are therefore not eligible for independent copyright protection. At most, it can be argued that the model is an automatically transformed version of the input data, so that copyright in the input data implies copyright in the model.1 Perhaps hyperparameter choices could reflect some creative input. This is very much an active topic of debate. Given this uncertainty, it would be impossible to create a public license that works reliably. 1. An interesting discussion topic is the potential effect on Microsoft's Copilot ML model which was also trained on GPL-licensed source code. Instead of deriving force from copyright law, it would be possible to impose conditions via a contract, i.e. EULA-like terms that only provide access to the material after the terms have been accepted. But again, this is difficult. Contract law differs wildly between jurisdictions. For example, a contract is defined by the “meeting of minds” in some jurisdictions; by offer, acceptance, and consideration in others. But how does such a contract ensure appropriate consideration? How can acceptance be ensured if the material is publicly available? For these reasons, I think that unless broad international agreement emerges about IP protections for machine learning models, such a copyleft system for ML models is impossible. It is worth noting that the lack of such protections is probably quite good for innovation and research, since researchers are free to improve each other's work without legal concerns. The idea of copyleft is a hack to subvert the “everything is forbidden by default” system of copyright, but “everything is allowed by default” might be better.2 2. To continue the Microsoft Copilot example: some copyleft advocates like Bradley M Kuhn are sceptical about Copilot's GPL compliance, but remind us that copyleft maximalism means copyright maximalism, and that this is not the goal of open source. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/feb/03/github-copilot-copyleft-gpl/
It depends on what you are selling to the enterprises. You could be selling just a licence to use the program, and retain all the rights on the source code. You could be selling the rights to the source code. For #1, the source code is yours and you can do what it pleases with it1. In fact many programs offer both an open-source licence (which usually forces the user to make its changes to the code publicly available) and a commercial one (which allows the user to keep the modifications of the source code for themselves). For #2, the source code is no longer yours so it is not up to you to decide what to do with it. 1I am assuming no other agreements imposing limits on those; for example that none of your contracts to your customers have a clause forbidding you from making the code available to the public.
Ideas (methods of playing, game mechanics, strategy, goals) cannot be protected by copyright. But any part of a creative work can. So, no copying of drawings, patterns, images, sounds, or the element. I suppose copying the software code is not an issue here, but it can, obviously, also not be copied. And nothing in your game can look like someone's else trademark.
You cannot do this through any established public license that I know of, but you could write your own. The model would be any educational use or non-commercial use license, such as CC NC licenses. The main challenge is defining the excluded classes of usage. That is why you should engage an attorney to draft this for you. I don't think there is any point in adding a $5M penalty clause. You offer a separate paid license for individuals who do not want to comply with the particular terms of your license, and set the fee to whatever you want. Saying that you're gonna fine violators is a bad idea because penalty clauses are illegal. Instead, the standard approach is a liquidated damages clause, where you state what a reasonable estimate of your damages would be. In the case of software that is available for purchase, illegal copying of the software obviously results at least in the cost of the software qua lost revenue as damages. Plus shipping and handling.