copyright:
a set of laws allowing for registration and protection of copywrited works, being:
the registration of a product/concept and/or it’s intellectual likeness, acknlowaged and managed by a legal entity.aaa
Intellectual property:
the property of which the holder is in ownership of the intellectual presence of the concept
Software license:
A stating of the ownership, usage, liability, and repurposing parameters of a certain software (referenced to as intellectual property)
License terminology:
- Licence: Formal permission to use a product. Almost always non-exclusive (can be licensed to multiple users).
- Agreement: A mutual agreement between two parties, commonly accepted by agreeing to (terms of service) upon download/registration.
- Term: The period of time the agreement is in force, almost always immediately to when the terms and conditions are accepted, either party can terminate the agreement if the other party fails to act according to the agreement.
- Warranty: An assurance of sort, that the product will serve it’s intended purpose for a minimum period of time. if a product is sold ‘As Is’ this addresses bugs and the developer’s limited liability for when problems may occur in the program and/or service.
- Limited use: limiting a software’s use cases for it’s users, commonly used to forbid copying and/or efforts to reverse engineer
- Liability: An obligation or debt as a consequence of some event.
- Program: The software
- Reverse engineer: decompilation, forbidden in most agreements
- Backup copy: A copy of the software for archival purposes.
different types of modern software licenses:
commonly include:
open source licenses:
MIT - all liability revoked from owner, anyone is free to repurpose and resell as long as the license persists, credit to owner is not mandatory
GPL - all liability revoked from owner, anyone is free to repurpose as long as license persists and owner is credited
proprietary:
when a software and all iterations of said software are owned in full by a legal entity as a property.
Different software licenses:
- commercial:
- shareware: copies can be made for archival or distribution
- freeware:
- public domain licence: although covered by copyright law, most licenses remove many traditional licenses
- open source:
- site licence: specifies the specific number of machines the software can be installed and/or the location of said machines
- Creative commons:
events leading to licenses:
- unintended/unfaithful usage of created software.
- the development of mass storage - usb drives, hdd, ssd, floppy disks
- the development of networks - enable data to be transferred quickly and effortlessly to other people.