I have a script built in php (which is open source) and i want to heavily modify it (including it’s look). I have checked the files and there is no copyright, no license, no legal information…
If i create my new script based on the existing one, will i own the copyright for it? If not, can someone prove that they are the rightful owners of this initial script (if yes, how?)
I didn’t find any help related to copyright of code, especially as it’s open source code.
Hope anyone can help.
Copyright is pretty straightforward: The code’s copyright is held by its author. It does not need to be claimed or written in some kind of agreement, copyright is granted by law as soon as the code is saved to a file.
If the author puts it on his website and says you can download it, then you can do that, but the copyright is still held by its author. Copyright gives the author exclusive legal rights to make copies and distribute the work and any derivative works. That means you can’t distribute his code, or a derivative work you make by modifying his code. It’s not legal to do so.
The absence of any type of copyright or license documentation means you have no evidence to show the author has given up any of his legal rights to the work.
Thanks Dan - this is pretty straight forward, i understood it the same way you explained it.
But, let’s consider this example to see where i’m trying to get:
PHP is open source, so i can use the same expression, <?
echo “Hello World”;?> without having to ask someone for approval. Let’s say both the original script and my script have only 30% of the same code - (code which is in pieces of code like the one above) - how will anyone know who the copyright belongs to? Because if say i want to code a script from scratch - i will have to use the same piece of code to send some data to a database, same piece of code that is being used by other scrips as well. I am not copying other things, it’s just the fact that some things can only be done in one way…
Hope you understand what i am trying to say…
All languages are “open source” by your definition.
But that doesn’t matter.
A derivative work is created when you take one work and modify it, or use one work as the basis for another.
It’s illegal if you took this person’s code and changed 70% of it. It’s not illegal if you happened to come up with the same 30% of the code on your own.
Two stories that have the same plot but were developed entirely independently are each protected by copyright and neither author has created a derivative work of the other. But if one author can show that the other read his work and produced the same story a month later, he’ll likely lose an infringement suit.
If you don’t think the original author can prove anything, then it comes down to ethics. Do you want to be a person that knowingly creates and distributes a derivative work in violation of someone else’s rights?
I am just saying - i will use 30% of the same code, but it will be written by me, all of it - but the 30% can’t differ from the original one, because that code is mandatory to a create a function or something.
My main question (and concern is) how can you define copyright for an expression like <? echo “hello world” ?> ?
Let’s say a script has 3 lines and one of them is the one above. If i create another 3 script line, that does the 99% same thing as the first and it contains the echo above, will it be considered copyright infringement?
For php code for example, how can you prove that you OWN 10 lines of code that make a script? And if you can OWN them, does this mean that no one else is allowed to use them in the same configuration without your approval?
The work has to be long enough to be considered original and creative to be protected by copyright. The individual lines don’t have to be, no more than you can say a book isn’t protected because all the words it use can be found in the dictionary too. You never have to consider the question “is <?php echo something; ?> protected”, because it’s the whole work you look at.
The ingredient list of a recipe is not protected by copyright, because it is simply facts, not original or creative. A collection of recipes is protected by copyright, because the aggregation and organization of recipes is original and creative. Someone else creating a recipe book may include the same list of ingredients in a recipe for the same food – just like your “30% can’t differ from the original” – but the work as a whole is original so it’s not an infringement. But if someone else instead took a chapter out of an existing recipe book, changed and added things a bit… that’s a derivative work and copyright infringement.
Yes exactly, that’s what i read and understood from various sources, but to be considered original but for web code, where is this defined, the length… ?
To take your example, 10 ingredients make a recipe and to make a new one, i keep 3 of them, add 7 new ones of my own and i have a 10 ingredients recipe of my own and i can claim copyright for it.
But it it the same for web code? if i keep 30 lines of code and add 70 of my own, will it then be considered my work?
It is not defined, there is no such thing. The judge or jury will decide based on the facts of the case.
Just don’t copy code from other people’s applications and you won’t ever have to think about these things. If you want to implement an application similar to someone else’s, do it by writing your own code from scratch. Then it doesn’t matter whether some of the code is similar or not.
That’s what i will do, i will write the code from scratch, but my main concern is that if the code will look the same, how can i prove it was written by me and not someone else?
If you wrote it from scratch without looking at the other author’s code, the chances of you coming up with the same code are pretty near 0. Your code won’t look like anyone else’s.
Thousands of computer science professors around the world can attest to this as they run students’ homework through programs that check for similarity. It is statistically improbable that two programmers will come up with the same exact way to approach a problem, call all the functions in the same order, use all the same indentation, name all their variables/functions/classes the same, declare them all in the same order, etc.