> If their code is proprietary, no one can use it. Even if they accidentally uploaded it to a public site.
Surely this depends on the terms under which they uploaded it. I would expect npm to have a legal structure in place under which code you upload for public use is also licensed for public use.
That would be the "terms under which they uploaded it"
NPM doesn't appear to have a "default license" though, so that would be "no license", therefore normal copyright law would seem to apply, and you can't make a copy of it, and more than you can copy a picture on a billboard or a blog post or whatever.
IANAL but if someone makes code publicly available (for 3 years). Then isn't there an argument to be made that its reasonable to make use of it? Probably not redistribute it, but use it at least. So I'm not even sure an explicit upload license would be required.
You seem to be arguing for an implied license; such things do exist—but the exact scope is often not obvious even to lawyers in the absence of case law covering very similar situations as to the kind of content and the use to be made of it.
If you leave your keys in your car for 3 years it's still illegal for me to take a joy ride in it. I don't personally believe in/support the concept of IP but in a world that does (like the US) it doesn't make sense to me that people being able to see your property for 3 years gives them the right to use it.
Actually, in the US "Abandoned Vehicle" is a legal thing and depending on local laws you might very well be able to claim, and get title to a vehicle that has been abandoned on your property. And the abandonment period can be really short, 48 hrs in some states. It depends on your state's definition of "abandoned vehicle", and local laws, and it will probably require a few trips to the DMV and might require filing in small claims court, but there is a legal process for gaining ownership of a vehicle that has been left on your property.
Same for any lost property, if you find something valuable (wallet full of cash), you generally have to turn it in to the police, and there is a notification process to try to find the owner, and after a period of time (generally 3 months), if no one has claimed it, it's yours. Again, local laws are going to differ, but the general legal concept, that "A finder of property acquires no rights in mislaid property, is entitled to possession of lost property against everyone except the true owner, and is entitled to keep abandoned property."[1] is common.
There's some old saying about possession being 9/10ths of the law....
I have never ever seen a sign next to the mints saying they a free for patrons. I just assume because that's the done thing, I would make the same presumption about the software package.
Of someone leaves a car on my drive I can do something about it, you may not be able to do in your territory. I'm surprised there isn't the a legal concept of abandonment though, what do you do if someone drops an empty can on your land?
With physical property, there is the concept of Squatter's Rights. With copyright, if you fail to protect it adequately (which I don't think is very well defined by the court system), then the IP in question can pass into the public domain.
I'm not sure what all rights (physical or otherwise) might be applicable here.
> With copyright, if you fail to protect it adequately (which I don't think is very well defined by the court system), then the IP in question can pass into the public domain.
This is not true. Not even remotely true. It is routine that a company notices someone using their copyrights after decades and then sues about it. Oracle is suing Google over code that was "unprotected" for a decade before they decided to sue. In Australia (I know, different country, but this is the same), Men at Work were successfully sued 29 years after they released "Land Downunder" because it has a two bar riff with similarity to a song written in 1928 [1].
As a side note, I see this all the time. What is it about this particular topic that people seem to (a) consistently confuse these things but more importantly (b) feel confident enough about ti to repeat the confused viewpoint with certainty to others?
What if the public site states in their terms that they must be granted those rights on the uploaded material, and the actual copyright holder is the one who does the uploading (but accidentally)?
The software could contain a trade secret, and someone could discover it from reading the source (e.g. the banks magic evaluation function for credit ratings, or their trading strategy, or ...). That doesn't grant them any protected right on the software, which is protected by copyright.
If you don't have a license from the copyright holder, you can't legally use it, except for fair use exemptions: perhaps you could write a blog post criticizing it.
> If you don't have a license from the copyright holder, you can't legally use it, except for fair use exemptions: perhaps you could write a blog post criticizing it.
To be clear, do the files contains a copyright or licence, if they do not and many companies don’t attach a copyright header to their files. Why would the assumption be that the files are not public domain or free for use
Theres nuance though, that copypasting a previous comment doesn't answer.
What about public domain works for example?
Or you had a good faith belief you had permission from the copyright holder, eg someone misrepresented themselves as the copyright holder, or the copyright holder published the code in public without a copyright notice?
Public domain: any software made to run on current machines is too new to have expired copyright; the author(s) may have dedicated it to the PD, but you have to find that dedication, which is equivalent to a license.
Good faith: that may affect the amount of damages the copyright holder can extract, but it's still illegal to use the software.
Copyright notices: haven't been required for 30 years.
Copyright older than 30 years still requires the notice (and this is banking software).
My underlying point though was that it was an unreasonable answer, to just copy paste the previous answer. No one here that I've seen has claimed to be a lawyer, and no one I've seen has defined what nations laws we are talking about. At that level of discourse, the question posed, deserved a reasonable answer.
> Copyright older than 30 years still requires the notice
Nope, only on works published over 30 years ago. This package was published only three years ago, regardless of when it was created.
There really isn't much nuance under the copyright rules almost universally agreed under treaties like Berne, UCC and TRIPS. This kind of what-ifing a clear statement just sounds like a bad movie trope.
We don't know when it was first published though. If its Cobol code, with dates from the 70s in the comments, that's different to if being JavaScript or some such.
And if you get enough money and lawyers in one place you can create plenty of nuance.
Dragonwriter reminded me of the term, implied licence in another subthread. That clearly seems arguable in this case even if it isn't considered winnable. Case law progresses through winning 'unwinnable' cases.
I think we're approaching this from completely different positions though. I appreciate the what-ifing, exploring the hypotheticals. It isn't as if we have any power to make a difference in a court of law, and I would hope no one is relying on this thread for legal advice.
Buying a Rolex from some guy in a car park is different to buying one from a jewelers. The former wouldn't protect you in any way, the later would let you demonstrate a good faith belief that it wasn't stolen, and wasn't fake.
This is a tangent but there's nothing wrong with buying a fake. So you can have a good faith belief that it was a counterfeit, which can protect you somewhat in the case that it was stolen.
More generally, say if wanted consumer protections consistent with it being a Rolex, or if you wanted to sell it as a Rolex. Then whether you bought it as a fake does matter.
We're talking about code. Which is more like a recipe than a novel.
If Coca Cola writes down its proprietary recipe on their entrance "by mistake", I can definitely make use of it. Maybe I can't photocopy it for sale, but I can definitely re-use their previously-secret techniques.
I can even say I got it from them through their own error and have the exact same outputs for the exact same inputs.
Trade secrets aren't your secret anymore once you publish them.
All we know in this case is that copyright law was used as a tool to remove it.
If you reverse engineer a system and write a spec using clean-room technique, it's going to be massively easier for the team to do it if they have lawful access to the no-longer proprietary source code.
And wouldn't that be the method to re-create your own copyrightable implementation of GPL code too?
As someone above posted the wider "List of parties to international copyright agreements", this is one of the boxes that need to be ticked prior to signing any form of deal between countries. It's a kind of 'fundamental' in order to start doing business with that country (or for the country to be taken seriously).
DPRK only recognises foreign copyrights, and have no concept of IP for its own works (because everything is done to superior order, there is no creativity allowed). Micronesia does not have copyright, but has even stricter regime of creative works, amounting to a patent-like protection.
I can't possibly see how they would possibly have any case.