Someone is commercially using a feature of my (free) website. What can I do?
<p>Suppose tht there is a website that allows users to create musical diagrams (sheet music). It is owned and operated by a person O.</p>
<p>Suppose the website allows users to create and share sheet music. All of the website is completely free (no registration fees and no paid features). However O has mentioned in the footer of the page that &quot;The use of the website is not permitted for commercial purposes&quot;.</p>
<p>Recently O has become aware of a published book that has used diagrams made by the site's online editor, without consulting O first. Does this constitute a breach of the website terms and conditions? Is O entitled to some kind of compensation?</p>
<p>For info, the diagrams themselves use open source fonts for the notation of the musical symbols, and the rest is just standard sheet music. However O has a special style of presenting those diagrams on the website, which is (just) composed of a small graphical feature like a bolded line or a different coloured note symbol.</p>
<p>I think that because the diagram was created by the user on a free website, the user has the intellectual copyright to those diagrams. However, he created them using <strong>this website</strong> where O explicitly said that &quot;<strong>The use of the website is not for commercial purposes</strong>&quot;. And yet the diagrams appeared in a commercially released book.</p>
<p>What are the legal aspects of this? What rights would O have in such a situation?</p>

<p>You would first have to find out if publishing a book was &quot;for commercial purposes&quot;. I can write a book and publish it as a hobby.</p>
<p>Next you check if there is any copyright infringement. It doesn't sound like there is. Using your website as a tool to create these diagrams doesn't give you copyright unless the result contains your own copyrighted work.</p>
<p>So at best there is a violation of your terms and conditions for your website. You can sue about that, but might have to specify damages. If you allow commercial use say for a fee of $1,000, that would give you grounds to claim damages. Or if someone used your website so excessively that it costs you money, that would be damages.</p>

<p>Consider the following two usage scenarios:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Someone uses a web-based tool to produce a graphic layout that they end up selling.</p>
</li>
<li><p>Someone develops a web site that accepts input from paying clients, processes it into the form required by some other web-based tool, uses that tool to produce graphic layouts, and delivers those layouts to the paying clients.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Absent more detailed licensing terms, I think &quot;not for commercial use&quot; would imply a desire to prohibit the second usage scenario above, but likely not the first.  Suing anyone for breach of license would require showing that they could not have reasonably interpreted the license as authorizing their actions, and I would not regard as unreasonable someone's interpretation that the license was only intended to forbid the second scenario above (or others that were more like it than like the first).</p>

copyright internet publishing