Copyright & Licenses for People Who Ship Code

Questions

1. 1
   Not answered. Your blog post explains a rate-limiting algorithm you invented. What can your copyright stop someone from doing?
2. 2
   Not answered. When does copyright attach to a source file you just wrote?
3. 3
   Not answered. Copyright is automatic, so what still has to happen before you can file a US infringement suit over your own code?
4. 4
   Not answered. A public GitHub repo has no LICENSE file. What are you actually permitted to do with the code?
5. 5
   Not answered. You paid a freelancer to write a module and the contract says nothing about IP. Who owns the copyright?
6. 6
   Not answered. Which of these fall outside what copyright protects?
7. 7
   Not answered. Does releasing your project under MIT give away your copyright?
8. 8
   Not answered. Why is "this is fair use, so I'm allowed" a misleading thing to say?
9. 9
   Not answered. How many factors does 17 U.S.C. § 107 direct courts to weigh when deciding fair use?
10. 10
    Not answered. Which of these are actually among the four statutory fair use factors?
11. 11
    Not answered. Does a commercial purpose automatically defeat a fair use claim?
12. 12
    Not answered. What did the Supreme Court actually decide in Google v. Oracle (2021)?
13. 13
    Not answered. Your team is in Berlin and plans to rely on "fair use". Which concerns are well founded?
14. 14
    Not answered. Before sending a DMCA takedown notice, what must a US rights holder do about fair use?
15. 15
    Not answered. You ship a closed-source desktop app that statically links an MIT-licensed library. What does MIT require of you?
16. 16
    Not answered. Which of these licences gives you an express patent licence from every contributor?
17. 17
    Not answered. What single act terminates your patent licence under Apache-2.0?
18. 18
    Not answered. Which conditions does Apache-2.0 § 4 impose when you redistribute?
19. 19
    Not answered. Apache-2.0 grants copyright and patent rights. What does it explicitly withhold?
20. 20
    Not answered. What does BSD-3-Clause add that BSD-2-Clause does not?
21. 21
    Not answered. SPDX lists MIT and X11 as separate identifiers. What is the difference?
22. 22
    Not answered. A third party holds a patent covering the technique your MIT-licensed dependency implements. Does MIT protect you?
23. 23
    Not answered. Your company patches a GPLv3 tool and runs it only on internal build machines. Must you publish the changes?
24. 24
    Not answered. Which verb does GPLv3 define as the act that triggers its source-code obligations?
25. 25
    Not answered. Which of these count as conveying a GPLv3 work?
26. 26
    Not answered. What actually triggers AGPL-3.0's extra source obligation?
27. 27
    Not answered. You deploy an unmodified AGPL-3.0 application as a public service. What does § 13 require?
28. 28
    Not answered. SSPL-1.0 is AGPL-3.0 with § 13 rewritten. What does the rewrite demand that AGPL never did?
29. 29
    Not answered. Does shipping a GPL utility and your proprietary binary in the same container image force you to open-source the binary?
30. 30
    Not answered. Under GPLv3 § 8, how many days must a copyright holder stay silent after you stop violating before your licence is permanently reinstated?
31. 31
    Not answered. Which of these did GPLv3 add relative to GPLv2?
32. 32
    Not answered. Your proprietary app links an LGPLv3 library. Which obligations does § 4 put on you?
33. 33
    Not answered. How far does MPL-2.0's copyleft reach into your codebase?
34. 34
    Not answered. Why can Apache-2.0 code go into a GPLv3 project but not a GPLv2 one?
35. 35
    Not answered. What is the practical difference between GPL-2.0-only and GPL-2.0-or-later?
36. 36
    Not answered. Why does CC0 contain a fallback licence instead of simply declaring the work public domain?
37. 37
    Not answered. What does CC0 explicitly not waive?
38. 38
    Not answered. What one thing does Creative Commons itself recommend against using CC licences for?
39. 39
    Not answered. A US federal agency publishes a tool on GitHub with no licence, saying it is "a work of the US Government". What follows?
40. 40
    Not answered. For a work created today by an identified human author, US copyright lasts for the author's life plus how many years?
41. 41
    Not answered. On 1 January 2026, which US-published works entered the public domain?
42. 42
    Not answered. Which tag goes in a source file header to declare its licence in machine-readable form?
43. 43
    Not answered. A package declares (MIT OR Apache-2.0). What does that mean for you as the consumer?
44. 44
    Not answered. Which readings of these SPDX expressions are correct?
45. 45
    Not answered. In package.json, what does "license": "UNLICENSED" mean?
46. 46
    Not answered. Which of these are not OSI-approved open source licences?
47. 47
    Not answered. Under BUSL 1.1, what is the maximum number of years before the code must convert to its Change License?
48. 48
    Not answered. The JSON License is the MIT licence plus one sentence. Why isn't it open source?
49. 49
    Not answered. You open a pull request against an Apache-2.0 project that has no CLA. Under what terms is your contribution licensed?
50. 50
    Not answered. What does adding Signed-off-by: to a commit under the Developer Certificate of Origin actually do?
51. 51
    Not answered. You bundle a React app with 40 npm dependencies into one minified bundle.js. Which obligations survive the build step?