copyright infringement

Examples of copyright infringement in the following topics:

• Doing Nothing

  • Most projects never collect CLAs or copyright assignments from their contributors.
  • But every now and then, someone may decide to sue for copyright infringement, alleging that they are the true owner of the code in question and that they never agreed to its being distributed by the project under an open source license.

• Digital Media and Intellectual Property Issues

  • Generally, it is "the right to copy," but also gives the copyright holder rights including:
  • Most jurisdictions recognize copyright limitations, allowing "fair" exceptions to the creator's exclusivity of copyright, and giving users certain rights.
  • Some critics label the unauthorized distribution and copying of commercial products as piracy, or digital copyright infringement.
  • It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.
  • Some libertarian critics of intellectual property have argued that allowing property rights in ideas and information creates artificial scarcity and infringes on the right to own tangible property.

• Forced Entry

  • Issues surrounding this type of crime have become high-profile, particularly those surrounding hacking, copyright infringement, and child abduction.
  • The original motivation of the hackers was to watch Star Trek re-runs in Germany, which was something Newscorp did not have the copyright to allow.

• Ethical Issues at an Organizational Level

  • Notable cases of intellectual property copyright infringement cases include Napster, Eldred v.

• Basic Judicial Requirements

  • Patent and copyright infringement disputes and prosecutions for federal crimes, the jurisdiction of the district courts is exclusive of that of the state courts.

• Patents

  • Copyright and trademark problems can always be gotten around.
  • If part of your code looks like it may infringe on someone else's copyright, you can just rewrite that part.
  • Once someone has accused a free software project of infringing a patent, the project must either stop implementing that particular feature, or face an expensive and time-consuming lawsuit.
  • Thus, manufacturers dare not publish their full interface specifications, since that would make it much easier for competitors to figure out whether any patents are being infringed.
  • Second, and most ingeniously, it punishes anyone who initiates a patent infringement claim on the covered work, by automatically terminating their implicit patent license the moment such a claim is made:

• Aspects of Licenses

  • Some free licenses stipulate that any use of the covered code be accompanied by a notice, whose placement and display is usually specified, giving credit to the authors or copyright holders of the code.
  • Trademark-protecting licenses specify that the name of the original software (or its copyright holders, or their institution, etc.) may not be used by derivative works without prior written permission.
  • Both the GNU General Public License version 3 and the Apache License version 2 contain language designed to prevent people from using patent law to take away the rights granted (under copyright law) by the licenses.
  • They require contributors to grant patent licenses along with their contribution, covering any patents licenseable by the contributor that would be infringed by their contribution (or by the incorporation of their contribution into the work as a whole).
  • Then they go further: if someone using software under the license initiates patent litigation against another party, claiming that the covered work infringes, the initiator automatically loses all the patent grants otherwise provided for that work by the license, and in the case of the GPLv3 loses their right to distribute under the license altogether.

• Copyrights

  • Copyright Office.
  • If the business developed the work in question, the value of the copyright is equal to the cost the business incurred securing the copyright.
  • Since a copyright eventually terminates, it is amortized.
  • This means that the book value of the copyright is divided by the useful life of the copyright to determine the amortization amount.
  • This continues until the value of the copyright equals zero.

• Introduction to Contributor Agreements

  • There are three ways to handle copyright ownership for free code and documentation that were contributed to by many people.
  • The first is to ignore the issue of copyright entirely (I don't recommend this).
  • The third way is to get actual copyright assignments from contributors, so that the project (i.e., some legal entity, usually a nonprofit) is the copyright owner for everything.
  • (Also, actual copyright transferral is subject to national law, and licenses designed for the United States may encounter problems elsewhere (e.g., in Germany, where it's apparently not possible to transfer copyright). )
  • Because they know they can do this, most contributors cooperate when asked to sign a CLA or an assignment of copyright.

• Transfer of Copyright

  • Copyright transfer means that the contributor assigns to the project copyright ownership on her contributions.
  • Some projects insist on full assignment because having a single legal entity own the copyright on the entire code base can make enforcement of the license terms somewhat more convenient, if they ever need to be enforced in court.
  • Some simply get an informal statement from a contributor on a public list mailing list—something to the effect of "I hereby assign copyright in this code to the project, to be licensed under the same terms as the rest of the code."
  • Since the FSF is copyright holder for a lot of popular software, they view this as a real possibility.
  • In general, unless there's some specific reason why your project needs full copyright assignment, just go with CLAs; they're easier for everyone.