Intellectual property & Copyrights
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It all depends on the license you release your code under. You can decide what you want it to be licensed under, but once you license it under that license, you can't take back the license's rights. You can make it more lenient, but you can't make it stricter. As a general rule, if you don't specify a license, then people can copy and distribute your code as much as they like, but they can't claim it as their own.
**"Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, a touch that never hurts." -- Charles Dickens
jdunlap wrote: You can make it more lenient, but you can't make it stricter. That simply isn't true. You have the right to do whatever you want to the item for which you have copyright. This is why source code is licensed, not sold. Unless explicitly prohibited in a license, the copyright owner retains the right to change the terms of the license at any time in any way. I don't know the legal precedence, but I imagine that, in general, such changes could not affect code already compiled, though it could affect development of such code and distribution of DLLs or other modules. (So if you are using a third party library and/or source code, your rights to use it for any future development could be cut off, depending entirely on the provisions of the original license, but any software already compiled would not be affected.) Do note that if you purchase a library, the license will almost always allow changes to that version of the library only under extraordinary circumstances. Even then, such changes would likely be litigated. One out for the seller is that they almost always retain the right to revoke your license at any time, though they probably would need to refund your money unless the revokation was due you using the code in violation of the license. jdunlap wrote: As a general rule, if you don't specify a license, then people can copy and distribute your code as much as they like, but they can't claim it as their own. As has been pointed out, under current US law, a copyright exists on any published work the moment it is published whether a notice is specified or not. A strong legal argument could be made that code published without an explicit license to use and/or redistribute the code, the code can only be read. Interestingly, Code Project does not have a legal clause requiring all code submitted to Code Project to be irrevocably licensed to Code Project and it's members in a manner similar to the BSD license. (Code Guru has such a provision.)(Note that such a provision does not prohibit a person from modifying their own code and then releasing it in a different manner under a different license, such as what Carlos did. If Code Project had a stricter licensing procedure, however, they could have legally prevented Carlos from removing his existing code on Code Project and/or changing the license to Code Project members.) Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.
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A copyright means that any and all text covered by the copyright may notbe reditributed without the permission of the copyright holder. Software source code falls under law - providing you copyright the code. If multiple people worked on the code, they all need to sign an agreemnet about the returns on that coxde. If you are working as a contractor or employee for a company, then most likely you hav e already signed away all rights to your code to include how it is used. As always - check your contract. But it is very rare for a paid contractor or employee to own code they developed while being paid by a company.
Do note that most, if not all, State laws make all work done by an employee the property of the employer--no explicit contract has to be signed, unless you want to contravene these provisions. (Most employment contracts are actually redundant, though useful in proving the employee/employer relationship.) Shared projects, especially where no money is exchanged, is a big gray area, largely untested in the courts. In cases where there is no single copyright holding entity, I suspect the courts would rule that the each original author retains full copyright of the code they produce. Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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What are the restrictions on the code as intellectual property? Do you agree with me, what i understand is that if i write some code, i will have my copy rights reserved for it and no body is allowed to copy as his own code or distribute my code without my permissions. Would it be my intellectual property as well?? Can someone tell me the legal aspects of these terminologies?:confused: @!$h@
Intellectual property is a general term covering what copyright, patent and trade secret laws protect. As stated by other posters, in the US (and, I believe, in most countries as well) a copyright is implied at the moment of physical creation. A notice need not be attached. However, by providing a notice you create a stronger case in court and, at least in the US, by registering the copyright you firmly establish a copyright date and are allowed to sue for more than actual damages. Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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Rohit Sinha wrote: you have to explicitly release your work into the public domain to give up your copyright. I know a few attorneys that could have a field day with that concept, and I'm sure you know that in this country they could get away with it. I believe that the best way to protect IP is to keep it a trade secret. For code, I'm not at all sure of the best way to do so, as it's really simple to disassemble or decompile code. Patenting is not really a smart way to do it, as part of the patent process includes full disclosure of the code behind the idea, and there's always a big company out there which has lawyers that can beat your lawyer. There's no simple solution, but I find it hard to believe that publication does not imply a public domain release. That's an entirely new concept to me. "Your village called -
They're missing their idiot."I think there may be some confusion here between copyrights and patents. People do not relinguish their copyright ownership merely by publishing their material. That could hardly be so, given that people publsih books all the time. But in patents, it is a different story. For something to be patentable the general test is whether something is new, useful, and non-obvious. It is hard to argue that something is "new" if it is already in the public domain before the patent is filed. So patents have to be filed before public release, but the same thing is not true when it comes to copyrights. It is still better to register copyrights because when it is done properly it is assumed that damages have occured (in the case of copyright infringement) and they don't have to be proved. If the copyright is not registered, then damages have to be proved. JM
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I think there may be some confusion here between copyrights and patents. People do not relinguish their copyright ownership merely by publishing their material. That could hardly be so, given that people publsih books all the time. But in patents, it is a different story. For something to be patentable the general test is whether something is new, useful, and non-obvious. It is hard to argue that something is "new" if it is already in the public domain before the patent is filed. So patents have to be filed before public release, but the same thing is not true when it comes to copyrights. It is still better to register copyrights because when it is done properly it is assumed that damages have occured (in the case of copyright infringement) and they don't have to be proved. If the copyright is not registered, then damages have to be proved. JM
John McIlroy wrote: If the copyright is not registered, then damages have to be proved. Now there's an important distinction. I wasn't aware of that. "Your village called -
They're missing their idiot."