Regarding Copyright and Scraping Code from the Web
Joe Bell
joe.bell at prodeasystems.com
Tue Oct 6 15:19:26 UTC 2009
Hi,
I am one of the individuals in my company responsible for ensuring that
we are compliant to the various open source licenses we are bound by,
and I'm curious as to whether or not I am taking the right approach with
my policy towards lifting code from blogs. There are a number of blogs
out there that contain no copyright statements or licensing terms yet
contain very useful and sometimes complex snippets of code in situ on
the web page. It has been my policy that:
a) whether or not there is a claim of copyright on the blog is
irrelevant, under U.S. law it is copyrighted by the author of the blog
b) by default non-copyright holders are forbidden from copying,
distributing, or modifying the work
c) without express claim of copyright as well as express license
terms (preferably favorable to the corporation), the code on the web
page may not in any way be copied into or used in any corporate work
To be truthful, I am sometimes surprised at the number of freelance
developers who aren't more aware of copyright law (regardless of their
national origin) and licensing, yet post code.
To my question, do others take such an approach? Am I being overly
sensitive and can relax the approach? Is there some other key piece of
information I may be ignorant of that would cause me to modify it?
Best regards,
Joe
This message is confidential to Prodea Systems, Inc unless otherwise indicated
or apparent from its nature. This message is directed to the intended recipient
only, who may be readily determined by the sender of this message and its
contents. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an
employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended
recipient:(a)any dissemination or copying of this message is strictly
prohibited; and(b)immediately notify the sender by return message and destroy
any copies of this message in any form(electronic, paper or otherwise) that you
have.The delivery of this message and its information is neither intended to be
nor constitutes a disclosure or waiver of any trade secrets, intellectual
property, attorney work product, or attorney-client communications. The
authority of the individual sending this message to legally bind Prodea Systems
is neither apparent nor implied,and must be independently verified.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20091006/e40e45ef/attachment.html>
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list