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  • How closely can a game resemble another game without legal problems

    - by Fuu
    The majority of games build on successes of other games and many are downright clones. So where is the limit of emulating before legal issues come into play? Is it down to literary or graphic work like characters and storyline that cause legal problems, or can someone actually claim to own gameplay mechanics? There are so many similar clone games out there that the rules are probably very slack or nonexistent, but I'd like to hear the views of more experienced developers / designers.

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  • Where can I get software-related legal advice?

    - by musicfreak
    Whenever someone asks a legal question here on SO, the response is usually something along the lines of "we are not lawyers." Okay, that's legitimate, but in that case, how can I talk to a lawyer about software-related legal matters? I could look through the phone book and find a local lawyer, but then I have no way of knowing whether the lawyer knows anything about software. (And I hear most local lawyers charge for your time, even if it's just a simple question.) Is there maybe some kind of online service for this sort of thing? For now, I'm just looking for some basic advice, so something free would be awesome, even if the "quality" is not as good. However, I'll still take any kind of paid services--I'll keep them in mind for the future. You can give me anything from a forum or QA site (like this one) to a professional service. Just remember that I'm looking specifically for software-related legal advice. I'm sure most lawyers know a thing or two about software, but I'd rather talk to someone who legitimately knows his stuff than someone who can only guess.

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  • Legal issues regarding embedding a toolbar into a browser [closed]

    - by OmarOthman
    We are in the process of developing a software that provides service to internet users and we would like to ask about the legal liabilities of some issues. Of course, everything is to be done with the consent of the user of our software but our concern is about third party tools and services that may be invoked/used by our product. In particular, these are the concerns: (1) Embedding a toolbar to an existing browser. This screenshot is an example, where the words in the highlighted toolbar are passed to www.google.com for searching, and the contents of the window are the results of the search. I want to know if any consent should be obtained before such a toolbar can be embedded in a web browser, whether there are any legal requirements by the web browser; whether different web browsers have different requirements (at least for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari). (2) Invoking a free website from that toolbar (like Google’s search page). The screenshot above demonstrates such an existing toolbar. (3) Full ownership and unrestricted access to the data entered to this toolbar. In the screenshot above, I want to take the words (translation english to spanish) and own them, i.e. storing them in my database and do some processing on them. (4) Ability to track the pages entered by the user starting from that free website. In the screenshot above, you can notice that the user opted only for the third result, whose URL is translate.google.com. I want to have access to this and all URLs clicked from this page for some processing as well. This is a commercial application, so I need a very concrete, precise and reference-supported answer.

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  • Legal Precautions of Customizing Ubuntu LiveCD

    - by Voulnet
    Hello everyone, the organization I work at wants to create a custom Ubuntu LiveCD, the customizations are: Pre-installed programs, plugins, some device drivers, and aesthetics such as icons and backgrounds, as well as changing Firefox's homepage and removing unneeded packages. Not big changes, obviously, and we wish to distribute this custom image for clients to use as a bootable CD or USB stick in order to have a quick environment where all our tools are available instantly. What are the licensing and legal consequences of this? What if some of the programs or plugins that are to be pre-packaged are not GPL'd? I should finally note that we are not changing any code in the kernel or any other distro component. Thank you for your time!

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  • The legal aspect of website design/application [closed]

    - by tunmise fasipe
    I have got a site to develop for a medium-sized company and I want to make sure it's being done professionally. I understand the following: Terms of Use: tells the users how the content on the website should and should not be used Privacy Policy: assuring the users that their information is safe on the site and will not be exposed without their permission. Also telling the which could be viewed by others Disclaimer (the client asked for this): tells the users the wrong/right use of the contents in the site is not the responsibility of the company My Questions are: How does copyright comes in? More light on the Disclaimer? - the client specifically asked for this What other legal actions one needs to take? Do you need to see a lawyer? How can you prevent others from having a counterfeit of your site - the client specifically asked for this too Thanks

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  • Legal Web Fonts & Licensing

    - by Phill
    So I'm a little confused in regards to legality of using fonts for web. Often from designers I get a PSD file and it uses a special font, and the font is supplied. However attempting to convert the font using: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator Ends up with a message saying it's blocked by Adobe. Not only that sometimes if the font can be converted, it often looks like crap when viewed in a browser. I assume that the generator is primarily for people to convert their own fonts, but if you purchase the use of a font then you can only use it for Web if the terms allows you to? The fonts used in PSD's are often Adobe Fonts, I can't find anything that suggests I can convert those and use them on the web. So I'm wondering if anyone knows the legal rights around using Photoshop supplied fonts on the web? In addition I'm wondering what resources are available (free/paid) that provide fonts that can be used on the web. Free: http://www.fontsquirrel.com http://www.google.com/webfonts Paid: http://www.fontshop.com This is the only one's I've found so far that aren't cartoon type fonts like what's primarily on www.dafont.com

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  • Website Ethics / legal issues, image copyrights

    - by RailsN00b
    Ignoring the technical implementation of a website for a second, assume a website that is similar to twitter but with pictures. A user say something and puts a picture of whatever they said. As the nature of the internet, the images will most likely not be his/hers image. There are 2 options that I see for dealing with this: 1. The user will post a URL of the picture and the website will pull the picture from that URL everytime someone enters that page 2. The website will save the image in its own database of images and display the image to the visitors 'locally' The problem with option #1, while it saved storage, I see an issue with 'stealing' other websites bandwidth and if my website has many many visitors it could cost the image-hosting websites a lot and possible even crash it if the server can't handle the load. The problem with opion #2, while it saves the load to other websites, it practically takes pictures that could have copyright on them. Which option is better to implement in terms of legal issues and ethics? When do I need to contact another website to request permission to use the images from that site? Does anyone really care about that anymore. Where can I read about this?

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  • Legal concerns with orchestrating a music submission contest

    - by Amplify91
    My team and I are getting pretty far along in the development of our latest game and have been thinking about audio. We decided to host an audio submission contest where we will offer a little cash and some equity stake in the game as prizes. We are also giving away copies of the game to participants. We hope not only to find audio for our game, but to meet some cool sound artists and promote the game a bit through the process. First of all, is this even a good idea? What are some potential dangers in doing this? Will it even be well received among artists? Secondly, I wrote up some Terms and Conditions in my best legal-speak to try to protect us and clarify how the contest will be run. Are these sufficient to make sure everyone involved is treated fairly and is legally protected? They are as follows: All submissions (The Submission) must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-3.0) By applying a CC-BY-3.0 license, you (The Submitter) expressly give Detour Games (and all members wherein) permission to copy, distribute, transmit, modify, adapt, and make commercial use of The Submission. The Submitter must own all rights to The Submission and be within their rights to license it as specified and submit it. The Submitter claims responsibility for the legality of The Submission. If The Submission is found to infringe on the rights of a person or entity other than those of The Submitter, Detour Games will not be held liable as all responsibility and liability for the legality of The Submission is that of The Submitter's. No more than two free copies of The Game per submitter. All flat cash prizes will only be disbursed pending the success of our first $5,000 Kickstarter campaign. These prizes will be disbursed 30 days after Detour Games receives the Kickstarter funds. All equity prizes (percentage of profits) are defined as the given percent of total profits after costs for a period of one year (12 months) after the release of RAW. These prizes will be disbursed semi-annually. All prize money will be disbursed through either an electronic fund transfer through a service such as PayPal or by a mailed money order. It is The Submitter's responsibility to cooperate with Detour Games in the disbursement of the funds. Detour Games reserves the right to change these Terms and Conditions at any time without notice. By participating in the contest, The Submitter agrees to and accepts all terms and conditions listed. What else could I do (legally) to protect everyone involved?

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  • Legal responsibility for emebedding code

    - by Tom Gullen
    On our website we have an HTML5 arcade. For each game it has an embed this game on your website copy + paste code box. We've done the approval process of games as strictly and safely as possible, we don't actually think it is possible to have any malicious code in the games. However, we are aware that there's a bunch of people out there smarter than us and they might be able to exploit it. For webmasters wanting to copy + paste our games on their websites, we want to warn them that they are doing it at their own risk - but could we be held responsible if say for instance a malicious game was hosted on an important website and it stole their users credentials and cause them damage? I'm wondering if having an HTML comment in the copy + paste code saying "Use at your own risk" is sufficient.

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  • Legal concern over "borrowed" code

    - by iandisme
    A company my friend works for (let's call him Me) recently unveiled a new face for their internal "networking" website. This new face looks remarkably like Facebook, and indeed, examination of the source code reveals that it's almost identical: The code, class names, and even the fonts are the same. There is also no indication that Facebook is in any way involved or aware. I know this is unethical, but is it illegal? I can't find anything concrete about this to help Me decide what to do about it. EDIT: We're talking front-end code. It does not appear to be linking to Facebook in any way.

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  • Cloning existing software for commercial purposes - legal implications

    - by user2036256
    I have been asked to clone some existing software for a company. Basically its an old 16 bit DOS console app, which was supplied free of charge in I believe the late 80's. Having replaced the machine that needs to run it with a box running Win7 x64 they can't get it to work. It crashes every couple of minutes under DOSbox. The company that supplied it appears to no longer exist - if they did the company asking me to do this would almost certainly know about it. Its undetermined whether they have gone entirely or are just trading under a different name. If the latter they seem to have withdrawn from the market related to this product (because again, niche area, we should know about everyone there). What is the status to this with regards to copyright etc.? The main concern for the company involved is they want an identical interface to what they already have so I would have to clone this entirely. Having no source code / indication of the underlying mechanisms these would be written from scratch. Is an interface covered by copyright? / Does that still hold 30 years later? What is the assumed license when none at all is provided? Under UK law would I be under any serious risk were I to take on the project? How would this pan out if I then decided to sell the software on to other companies? Thanks

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  • Where to prepare (legal) "embeded" documents for the web [on hold]

    - by WHITECOLOR
    Say I have to have terms of use on site, a place the text as marked up html. Where it is better to prepare this document initially if it is going to placed to the web? Considering that such documents are prepared and changed by lawyers, it is not very applicable for them to use text editor. And it is not very efficient to manually process content to prepare it for the web as it is changed. For now my solution is: Prepare document text in google docs keeping some simple structure (title, ordered lit of features, simple paragraphs), save as html (it will contain some unnecessary markup) and then use custom conversion tool (some script) to convert saved html from google docs to simple html and inject new version to the site. What is common practiceses for this problem? What is the workflow of preparing and publishing such documents.

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  • Making a clone of Starcraft legal?

    - by user782220
    My question is similar to a previous question. Consider the following clone of Starcraft: Change the artwork, sound, music, change the names of units. However, leave the unit hit points unchanged, unit damage unchanged, unit movement speed unchanged, change ability names but not ability effects. Is that considered illegal? In other words, is copying the unit hit points, damage, etc. considered illegal even if everything else is changed?

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  • Making a clone of a game legal?

    - by user782220
    My question is similar to a previous question. Consider the following clone of starcraft. Change the artwork, sound, music, change the names of units. However, leave the unit hitpoints unchanged, unit damage unchanged, unit movement speed unchanged, change ability names but not ability effects. Is that considered illegal? In other words is copying the unit hp, dmg, etc. considered illegal even if everything else is changed.

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  • Legal responsibility of public posts

    - by Murdock
    Given a public site with no logins: I let people post links to public Facebook profiles, and my site fetches the profile picture and displays it. Would it be ok if I just told people to post profiles of which they had the owner’s permission? Does such a statement exonerate me from copyright infringements and place the burden on the user? Edit: For bonus points. Can the statement just be a notice under the button (that will save the link) that says that "By clicking this button you agree to the terms and conditions" with maybe a link to the terms and conditions.

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  • As webdevelopment is it same to legal issues to make a sex dating sites?

    - by YumYumYum
    Like i have created many other normal sites which are not related to any dating/sexual content. Is it for a developer same rules and regulation while making a sex related dating sites? where people meet together, learn each others, for having a sex relaionship (you know what i mean), having also a feature of webcam sex but not explicitly a porno sites. Does those sites have any special legal terms and condition's for the developers comparing with non sexual/dating sites legal terms and conditions?

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  • Is it legal and ethical to reverse engineer software to port it to another system?

    - by Igor Zinov'yev
    I love gaming, I love games that allow modding and I love linux. But the fact that most games right now are targeted for windows (consoles aside), most mods and modding tools are also targeted for windows. There is a certain modder called Boris Vorontsov that makes a famous visual overhaul mod series called ENB. What he does (or I think he does) is he enhances or changes the behavior of classes defined in the d3d9.dll library. Needless to say it almost never works under wine. Recently I have asked him if he would ever release his version of the library under some open license, and he said "no". Now that I think of it, even if he did release his code, he would have surely faced some legal problems. Now there is my question. Is it legal and ethical to reverse engineer his version of the library to adapt the wine's open source version of d3d9.dll to be able to run his mods?

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  • Automated Legal Processing

    - by Chris S
    Will it ever be possible to make legal systems quantifiable enough to process with computer algorithms? What technologies would have to be in place before this is possible? Are there any existing technologies that are already trying to accomplish this? Out of curiosity, I downloaded the text for laws in my local municipality, and tried applying some simple NLP tricks to extract rules from sentences. I had mixed results. Some sentences were very explicit (e.g. "Cars may not be left in the park overnight"), but other sentences seemed hopelessly vague (e.g. "The council's purpose is to ensure the well-being of the community"). I apologize if this is too open-ended a topic, but I've often wondered what society would look like if legal systems were based on less ambiguous language. Lawyers, and the legal process in general, are so expensive because they have to manually process a complex set of rules codified in ambiguous legal texts. If this system could be represented in software, this huge expense could potentially be eliminated, making the legal system more accessible for everyone.

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  • What's your advise on a potential legal suit? [closed]

    - by ohho
    I [xxx app developer] received an email from Apple that a developer [of yyy app] believes I am "infringing their copyright." Description of Issue: [xxx developer] copied my application (my application is [yyy]) feature by feature. Even their donation model is completely copied from my application. Their first release was significantly later than mine, which implies copying of the application rather than parallel development. I suffered significant financial losses because of their actions, in additional to promotion problems as many people are confused with their product. My advertising was based around the idea of a "free [yyy] application for an iPhone" and they have just taken that as a title for their application. I would appreciate if someone takes a look at their release schedule and compare it to my releases. Additionally, please take a look at their functionality and how it point by point copies the functionality of my older releases. I am asking Apple to remove their application from the App Store, and ban them from resubmitting it. Thank you for your time! [yyy developer], the developer of the [yyy] application. My response was: The code of [xxx] is written by myself, using Apple public API. The graphics elements are designed by myself. The user interface and app control are independently designed and different from other [similar type] apps (please judge yourself). In-app Purchase is iOS Apple standard API. iAd is Apple iOS standard API. I don't think features can be owned exclusively. In fact, my app comes with fewer features, as I prefer minimalist design. I don't think idea can be owned exclusively. Apple responded: Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, Apple cannot serve as arbiter for disputes among third parties. Please contact [yyy developer] directly regarding your actions. You can reach [yyy developer] through: [...]. We look forward to confirmation from both parties that this issue has been resolved. If this issue is not resolved shortly, Apple may be forced to pull your application(s) from the App Store. Then I sent my response above to [yyy developer]. [yyy developer] then asked me "to provide (my) legal address and contact details that (his) lawyer requires to file a copyright infringement suit." IMO, I don't think the [yyy developer]'s claim on "feature by feature" copy is valid. I have fewer features, completely different user interface design. However, I don't think I can afford a legal action for an app of so little financial return. So what's your advise on this? Should I just let Apple pull my app? Or is there any alternative I can consider? FYI ... UI of [xxx app]: and UI of [yyy app]:

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  • Are there specific legal issues for web developers working on sex dating sites?

    - by YumYumYum
    Say I have created many ordinary websites which are not related to any dating/sexual content. Are the rules and regulations for a developer the same when making a sex-related dating site? I'm talking about a site where people meet together and get to know each other, with the intent of having a sexual relationship (you know what I mean), also featuring webcam sex, but not explicitly a porno site. Do such sites have any special legal issues for developers compared with non-sexual/dating sites?

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  • What are the legal consequences of customizing the LiveCD?

    - by Voulnet
    Hello everyone, the organization I work at wants to create a custom Ubuntu LiveCD, the customizations are: Pre-installed programs, plugins, some device drivers, and aesthetics such as icons and backgrounds, as well as changing Firefox's homepage and removing unneeded packages. Not big changes, obviously, and we wish to distribute this custom image for clients to use as a bootable CD or USB stick in order to have a quick environment where all our tools are available instantly. What are the licensing and legal consequences of this? What if some of the programs or plugins that are to be pre-packaged are not GPL'd? I should finally note that we are not changing any code in the kernel or any other distro component. Thank you for your time!

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  • Extracting main article from webpage/feed. Is it legal/ethical?

    - by Mahdi Ghiasi
    There are some applications like Readability and Pocket, which are letting users to read the main content of web pages, in a clean interface or such. But the articles should be bookmarked from another application, or the web browser. However, I'm creating a news reader app (Zite and Flipboard are popular news reader apps), and I want to create a clean experience for users, so I want to show full content of articles inside my application. Some websites have fulltext feeds, and I'm using it. But about some other websites, which don't have full text feeds: I want to know, is it legal/ethical to use for example Readability API (Or maybe writing my own code for this) to show full text of articles inside my application?

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  • What is the current legal status of magnet links?

    - by Moonwalker
    Prelude: I develop a cloud service which could be described as dropbox meets torrents and as side effect it enables distribution of arbitrary content via magnet links. Certain amount of magnet links will be displayed on the main website (I will be able to remove them one-by-one or ban users but no more). I will not be able to avoid magnets without complete rework of overall project architecture and either way it will hurt overall performance badly, probably making service meaningless. So my question is, what should I do, to avoid legal problems if my site in a nutshell is just a collection of magnet links? Privacy achieved via end-user encryption, so there is almost no access restrictions on the website. And anyway will help me any? Will hosting in particular country help me?

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  • Is there any advantage/disadvantage to using robots.txt to disallow access to legal pages such as terms, privacy policy, etc.?

    - by CaptainCodeman
    As I understand, having repetitive content is a detriment to search engine placement. Given that many websites that use similar or even identical "Terms and Conditions" and "Privacy Policy" pages due to similar legal wording or due to copy & pasting from the same source, would it be a good idea to disallow access to these pages via robots.txt, in order to avoid being penalized for "non-original content"? Or, on the contrary, could the search engines identify this as circumvention and penalize the site for trying to hide content? Or does it not matter?

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