2

My team at a non profit organization designed and developed a niche software product starting 2012. It was licensed under the MIT license until January 2022. Thereafter the license changed to a commercial license, since we weren’t able to continue development without any funding and no one was using or contributing to our souce code.

A state-funded organization decided to develop a visually exact copy of the software starting June 2022.

It is clear to me that any entity was allowed to do whatever they wanted with our software until January 2022.

Is the state-funded organization allowed to create an exact visual copy of the software after we changed the license before they started development? They did not use any part of our source code.

As stated in [1] the "look and feel" of a piece of software seems to be protected by copyright. The question is, if that is still the case if the software was published in the past using the MIT license?

[1] How far can a program's user interface be copied before it becomes copyright infringement?

Lina van der Weg
  • 21
  • 2

2 Answers2

1

The MIT licence is not revokable

You gave them permission to do what they are doing forever.

Dale M
  • 237,717
  • 18
  • 273
  • 546
0

It depends on how many protectable elements have been added or considerably modified since you switched to the commercial license. Anything that you published before changing the license is fair game, as Dale M's answer notes.

Furthermore, user interfaces can be copyrightable, but only insofar as they comprise copyrightable elements. If your UI is a few blocks of text on a solid-colored background, that'll be a "no" for UI copyrightability. (The text itself may be separately copyrightable.) Likewise, if your UI hasn't changed since you switched licenses, then it may be protected by copyright, but you gave them an irrevocable license to copy it, so you have no case against them.

OpenAI was the last straw
  • 615
  • 6
  • 12