For instance, copyleft licenses impose a duty on licensees to share their modifications to the work with the user or copy owner under some circumstances.
Exceptions to these rights are set out by the terms of Fair Dealing; these exempt users from copyright liability covering usage and reproduction when performed for research, private study, education, parody or satire.
Bill C-61 proposed alterations of the breadth and depth of exemptions for uses such as personal back-ups, reverse engineering and security testing.
According to Chapter XIV of Copyright Ordinance, a person can face a prison of up to 3 years and/or a penalty of up to one hundred thousand rupees if he is found guilty of renting computer software without permission of the owner.
[8] Copyright protection attaches to “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.” (17 U.S.C.A.
"[10] In Computer Associates vs Altai, the Second Circuit proposed the Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test for identifying these protected elements.
This test attempts to distinguish copyrightable aspects of a program from the purely utilitarian and the public domain.
Circuits differ on what it means for a work to be fixed for the purposes of copyright law and infringement analysis.
[11] The set of operations available through the interface is not copyrightable in the United States under Lotus v. Borland, but it can be protected with a utility patent.
CONTU decided that "computer programs, to the extent that they embody an author's original creation, are proper subject matter of copyright.
Many companies began to claim that they "licensed" but did not sell their products, in order to avoid the transfer of rights to the end-user via the doctrine of first sale (see Step-Saver Data Systems, Inc. v. Wyse Technology).
[15][17] In 1998, The United States Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which criminalizes evasion of copy protection (with certain exceptions), destruction or mismanagement of copyright management information, but includes a clause to exempt ISPs from liability of infringement if one of their subscribers infringes.
Other courts have held that "no bright-line rule distinguishes mere licenses from sales...The label placed on a transaction is not determinative".
[21] The Ninth Circuit took a similar view (in the specialized context of bankruptcy) in Microsoft Corp. v. DAK Industries, Inc.[22] By contrast, in the European Union the European Court of Justice held that a copyright holder cannot oppose the resale of a digitally sold software, in accordance with the rule of copyright exhaustion on first sale as ownership is transferred, and questions therefore the "licensed, not sold" EULAs in the EU.
[29] A copyleft is a type of copyright license that allows redistributing the work (with or without changes) on condition that recipients are also granted these rights.