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Of course windmills/turbines in general are not new and one would not need a license or permission to make and sell a "generic" wind turbine. But there are new types of wind mills invented and patented all the time. Examples are US7821148B2 Wind turbine and US8441138B2 Wind turbine.
Patents are complicated and an inventor of a new type of windmill ...
5
There can be no patent on the idea of wind wheels, as they are medieval "prior art". Likewise, many generator patents are no longer applicable, the first were invented back in 1831 by Faraday. Recombining a windwheel with a dynamo is almost as old - so the idea and basic setup of even the worst efficient wind turbines is not patentable: You can not ...
3
This is not "unfair competition". You are allowed to ask people for their views and take them into account in designing software, even with the specific intent that it compete successfully with existing software. In the US you have a protected right to do that under the First Amendment.
If the chat site where you asked is run by the developer or ...
3
The Youtube terms of service allow you to play music, and they do not impose any condition to the effect that you have to be alone in a soundproof room to play music. The school district might have a rule prohibiting the playing of music on school grounds (presumably with an exception for music classes), but there are too many school districts in Alabama to ...
3
This answer reflects US law; I don't know German law.
To be more precise, what parts of the chess game are copyrighted?
The parts which are not copyrighted are the facts of the individual games. These include the moves, the players involved, the venue, the clock times, draw offers, etc. Basically, anything found on the scoresheet.
The parts which are ...
3
A (legal) derivative work has its own independent copyright
I'll use the same example Wikipedia does, L.H.O.O.Q.:
This is a derivate work of da Vinci's Mona Lisa. It's a legal work because the Mona Lisa was well and truly public domain partly because da Vinci had been dead 401 years but mostly because he died 191 years before the first copyright law was ...
3
That a computer language is proprietary does not mean that all code written in that language is copyrighted by the holder of copyright on the language. Anyone may write, and publish, code in a particular language without permission from the language designers, or anyone else, provided that the code is original and is not a close paraphrase of code written by ...
3
The primary legal division is that you can lawfully talk about intellectual property (such talking becomes your intellectual property), and you can only redistribute intellectual property with the permission of the owner. (A contractual non-disclosure agreement is irrelevant, because you aren't an Apple employee obligae=ted to not talk about the new system ...
3
Yes, you may
The layout of the board and its appearance are not protected by copyright, because they are not expressions or any other type of copyrightable content. Even if they were (say if some protested art was displayed on the board) you are displaying this for instructional purposes, and not harming any market for the board, so fair use is likely to ...
2
A user's rights to intellectual property can be bargained away to various extents. In general, a user either has a right to IP because they created the IP, or because they acquired a right via a license and in exchange for consideration (e.g. a license to use MS Word, in exchange for money). Your app grants permission to use your IP (in exchange for ...
2
You are absolutely allowed to discuss or describe or criticizes software (or books or other copyrighted or trademarked things) without any permission from the copyright holder or trademark holder. This includes teaching people how to use those things.
You may not, however, copy protected software without permission. For example you could not include a CD ...
2
Note: As a jurisdiction is not specified, this answer assumes United States law throughout. OP's profile says they are in California, so this is hopefully correct.
Copyright law
You cannot transfer a copyright in an idea, because ideas are expressly excluded from copyright protection in 17 USC 102(b). So you can't have such a copyright in the first place.
By ...
1
First of all, it is possible that the software is in fact legal. Copies of older versions bought in bulk for resale but never sold are sometimes sold at large discounts because no one will buy them at more normal prices. And there are other scenarios (such as OEM licenses) under which these might be legal. In that case, there is no problem for anyone.
If ...
1
A person who contributed code to a github-based project, or indeed to any similar informal project, can freely reuse, modify or share that code, unless the person had promised not to in a contract or binding agreement. Many projects on Github are under open source licenses, where such agreements are not used. The question seems to indicate that no such ...
1
Under U.S. law, absent some express contractual obligation of Company A with Company B, or a relevant court decree, or disclosure obligation arising in the context of a lawsuit brought by Company B against Company A, there is no general affirmative duty to pro-actively disclose the use of Company B's intellectual property on the part of Company A.
It will ...
1
The rights of a landowner, in general, include the right to control access to his land (but these rights are subject to, among other things, the CROW Act you refer to).
The landowner may consent to you coming on to his land. That consent may be subject to conditions (for example, don't take photographs, or don't take photographs to be used commercially). You ...
1
... any countries' copyright laws ...
Here in Germany, we don't have a "Copyright" but an "Urheberrecht".
One of the main differences is that the "Urheberrecht" does not define the copyright as some kind of (negotiable) property which is owned by some person or company;
instead, it defines that as long as the person who created ...
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