Many countries now have data protection legislation which afford individuals the rights to: request that an organization hand over all information they hold on the individual and to request that any information held on the individual is destroyed Facebook got into trouble over the second part of this in the UK as it is nigh on impos...
Consider following steps: 0) Release open source Mock Program and Mock Plugin which communicate by certain interface (I), exchanging complex data structures, sharing memory and calling each other. Apply all-permissive license to it. 1) Release Plugin designed for working with any program in the way defined by interface (I). This plugin...
I like the simplistic look and design of some of the Microsoft blogs. Alas, I can't join the Microsoft dev party and create my own development blog on the blogs.msdn.com page because I don't work at Microsoft, and I already have my own wordpress blog. I was looking to have my blog styled to one of the default looking themes shown here: ...
What files do I need to put the header comment in for adding GPL to a C# project? Does form generated code require it? Does just need to be in every *.cs file? Is there a resource or in-depth list of language-specific steps required to add GPL to any kind of project? ...
I know that services like my.yahoo.com allow you to add content from RSS feeds to your personal page, but in general they are links which draw the user to the site which provided the feed. What are the legalities and implications of using RSS feeds as a data source for a site which repackages the data so as to be unrecognizable that it ...
I'm wondering if, when working on source for your employer, people include a copyright notice. For example /* * Developer : Developer Name ([email protected]) * Date : xx/yy/zzzz * All code (c)2008 company name inc. all rights reserved */ or anything similar? ...
I just finished a game for a certain mobile device. I'm just entertaining the idea of copyrighting my work. How does one do this? I really have no idea so any help is great! A friend who has some patents said that "you automatically own the copyright to anything original that you create." hmm not sure about this. note: I support O...
I wanted to write a small Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) program for my mobile device but I realized that there are some patent issues associated with that technique (exhibit 1 and exhibit 2). Can I write such program and try to make money with it? Would it be legal to give such program for free? ...
I once heard a prominent scientist say, of global warming, that he didn't realize how much he would have to learn about politics. I just read an excellent article in DDJ about the Jacobsen verus Katzer case. When in university, I didn't know how much I would have to learn about the law. It seems to me that a big hole in the classic com...
I run a small php/mysql website for a camera club where users can upload photos. I have recently started storing email addresses for doing password resets. My question is what is the best practice for dealing with users' personal information: are there any laws/legislation regarding what I can do with personal information? Do I need to...
This might be a stupid question but I just wanted to make sure... If I incorporate code generated by the IDE (Visual Studio in this case) in my software, can I apply my own license to that code or is it subject to its own license? ...
I need to include a copyright statement at the top of every Python source file I produce: # Copyright: © 2008 etc. However, when I then run such a file I get this message: SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xa9' in file MyFile.py on line 3, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details. Apparen...
Given that Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, if one were to take pseudocode or actual code examples from it and translate them into a given programming language, could this be considered making a derivative work? More generally, how does copyright work for encyclopedias, code cookbooks, internet forums to w...
I'm working on some code at the moment, but I was wondering what legal disclaimers you have? This is for some work that I'm providing to a friend for free. This isn't open source since there's competitive advantage in the internal workings of the program. I was thinking of something like: Copyright 2008 Egwor.com All rights rese...
Is it legal to more or less "copy" (or euphemistically, be very "inspired by") the idea and UI of a copyrighted program? This question popped in my mind when looking at "Things" which is a Mac-only program. How legal would it be for someone to make a Windows version of this program with a basically identical UI design and feature set? W...
Now that it looks like software patents are going to be severely limited, does anyone have a good argument for keeping them. It seems like copyright law serves software fine and patents just add overhead to what should be an almost frictionless process. Are there any examples of software that wouldn't have been written if not for paten...
When a web site is licensed under Creative Commons, I use the rel-license microformat. When a web site is licensed under regular copyright, I have a boring paragraph element. <p id="copyright">© 2008 Example Corporation</p> That id attribute on there is just for CSS styling purposes. I'm wondering if there's some better way to ma...
How should I license the code snippets used in my blog posts so that people feel free to use it without painful restrictions? My (very limited) understanding of copyright tells me that without any defined license that everything is protected as copyrighted which would have severe limitations on other's use. There's a good discussion ab...
Am I allowed to redistribute only parts of the DirectX package? (e.g. only the DirectDraw DLLs, without Show/3D/etc.) ...
Lately I've been pondering on how a specific beloved old game actually works. I had some mild progress, but then a friend pointed out that if I really loved the game and appreciate it, I wouldn't try to reverse-engineer it. Note that the game is long considered an abandonware and is offerd for download publicly in lawful game sites, an...