Copyright for non-commercial software

[aramis]

The question, under US law, is not "Did you actually cost them money?" but "Did you reduce their ability to have made money with it had they chosen to do so?"

Which can be:
1) you actually cost them money by depriving them of sales
2) you cost them future sales by devaluing their IP
3) you made money off their IP without their permission and outside the bounds of fair use
4) you derived value for an unrelated IP by use of their IP without permission
5) you derived an IP from theirs without their permission, and someone else then made money off of it with your permission

 

[Tysis]

Well I expect that there will be no issues here. At least one product has been created that does something similar (Heaven and Earth?).

So my response if someone actually asked me this in a lawsuit would be:

1. The product is out of print. There is no way I can cost sales.

2. Software will not devalue the IP. In fact it is a bit of a pain to do manually and thus may actually increase its value.

3. Not selling anything.

4. Not creating any intellectual property.

5. Again, not creating any intellectual property; simply derived business rules to implement said property. A couple of aspects were not clear and did have to be modified (hey, computers are stupid).

Also, my license blurb is very specific on non-commercial use. In other words: if you are doing this for your own fun have at it. You can post generated statistics and so on but cannot ever charge for it or solicited donations, etc.

Likewise, no company can use it and include the result in any commercial work. That may seem strict, but it should protect all concerned.

I will encrypt any of the .NET assemblies with commercial tool (go ahead, try to decompile...). Finally, distribution rights remain with me; if I post the software it will be in a single place.

That should cover everyone's rear.