A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license compatibility.
A license (US) or licence (Commonwealth) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something.
A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, libraries, user interface, or algorithm.
The first-sale doctrine is an American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property. The doctrine enables the distribution chain of copyrighted products, library lending, giving, video rentals and secondary markets for copyrighted works. In trademark law, this same doctrine enables reselling of trademarked products after the trademark holder puts the products on the market. In the case of patented products, the doctrine allows resale of patented products without any control from the patent holder. The first sale doctrine does not apply to patented processes, which are instead governed by the patent exhaustion doctrine.
The software patent debate is the argument about the extent to which, as a matter of public policy, it should be possible to patent software and computer-implemented inventions. Policy debate on software patents has been active for years. The opponents to software patents have gained more visibility with fewer resources through the years than their pro-patent opponents. Arguments and critiques have been focused mostly on the economic consequences of software patents.
Artificial scarcity is scarcity of items despite the technology for production or the sufficient capacity for sharing. The most common causes are monopoly pricing structures, such as those enabled by laws that restrict competition or by high fixed costs in a particular marketplace. The inefficiency associated with artificial scarcity is formally known as a deadweight loss.
White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company, 209 U.S. 1 (1908), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that manufacturers of music rolls for player pianos did not have to pay royalties to the composers. The ruling was based on a holding that the piano rolls were not copies of the plaintiffs' copyrighted sheet music, but were instead parts of the machine that reproduced the music.
A video game clone is either a video game or a video game console very similar to, or heavily inspired by, a previous popular game or console. Clones are typically made to take financial advantage of the popularity of the cloned game or system, but clones may also result from earnest attempts to create homages or expand on game mechanics from the original game. An additional motivation unique to the medium of games as software with limited compatibility, is the desire to port a simulacrum of a game to platforms that the original is unavailable for or unsatisfactorily implemented on.
Vault Corporation v Quaid Software Ltd. 847 F.2d 255 is a case heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that tested the extent of software copyright. The court held that making RAM copies as an essential step in utilizing software was permissible under §117 of the Copyright Act even if they are used for a purpose that the copyright holder did not intend. It also applied the "substantial noninfringing uses" test from Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. to hold that Quaid's software, which defeated Vault's copy protection mechanism, did not make Quaid liable for contributory infringement. It held that Quaid's software was not a derivative work of Vault's software, despite having approximately 30 characters of source code in common. Finally, it held that the Louisiana Software License Enforcement Act clause permitting a copyright holder to prohibit software decompilation or disassembly was preempted by the Copyright Act, and was therefore unenforceable.
Proprietary software is software that, according to the free and open-source software community, grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting their freedoms.
Liquid Audio Inc was a US software company based in Redwood City, California.
Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds, 911 F.2d 970 is an appeal filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Initially, Lasercomb filed an action against Holiday Steel for breach of contract, copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, fraud, unfair competition, and false designation of origin. The United States District Court ruled in favor of Lasercomb, awarding them punitive damages and actual damages for fraud, rejecting the defense of copyright misuse. On appeal, based on a recognition of the similarity to patent misuse, the holding was reversed, deeming the language contained in the license agreement unreasonable.
Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317, was a U.S. Court of Appeals Federal Circuit case involving Harold L. Bowers and Baystate Technologies over patent infringement, copyright infringement, and breach of contract. In the case, the court found that Baystate had breached their contract by reverse engineering Bower's program, something expressly prohibited by a shrink wrap license that Baystate entered into upon purchasing a copy of Bower's software. This case is notable for establishing that license agreements can preempt fair use rights as well as expand the rights of copyright holders beyond those codified in US federal law.
Typefaces, fonts, and their glyphs raise intellectual property considerations in copyright, trademark, design patent, and related laws. The copyright status of a typeface and of any font file that describes it digitally varies between jurisdictions. In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright but may be protected by design patent. Typefaces can be protected in other countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, by industrial design protections that are similar to copyright or design patent in that they protect the abstract shapes. Additionally, in the US and some other countries, computer fonts, the digital instantiation of the shapes as vector outlines, may be protected by copyright on the computer code that produces them. The name of a typeface may also be protected as a trademark.
The Louisiana Software License Enforcement Act refers to the Software License Enforcement Act (SLEA) adopted by the state of Louisiana. The bill was voted into law in September 1984 under Title 51 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes by the Louisiana State Legislature. Sponsored and mostly written by Vault Corporation, the SLEA defines the permissible terms and conditions of a software license agreement and the requirements for enforceability. The reverse engineering, decompiling or disassembling provision of the Louisiana SLEA was invalidated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruling in Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software, Ltd., 847 F.2d 255 .
Andy Johnson-Laird is an English-American computer scientist. He was the president of digital forensics firm Johnson-Laird Inc. in Portland, Oregon, where he lived with his wife, Kay Kitagawa.
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. ___ (2021), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision related to the nature of computer code and copyright law. The dispute centered on the use of parts of the Java programming language's application programming interfaces (APIs) and about 11,000 lines of source code, which are owned by Oracle, within early versions of the Android operating system by Google. Google has since transitioned Android to a copyright-unburdened engine without the source code, and has admitted to using the APIs but claimed this was within fair use.
Quaid Software, Ltd. was a software publisher based in Toronto, Ontario. The company's best known product was Copywrite which company president Robert McQuaid claimed was "for making legal backup copies of a protected program."
The protection of intellectual property (IP) of video games through copyright, patents, and trademarks, shares similar issues with the copyrightability of software as a relatively new area of IP law. The video game industry itself is built on the nature of reusing game concepts from prior games to create new gameplay styles but bounded by illegally direct cloning of existing games, and has made defining intellectual property protections difficult since it is not a fixed medium.
