DMCA and copyright complaints

Our work is legal under EU law

UniCAD builds free, open-source tools that let CAD files work across different programs. EU law protects this work:

• File formats, programming languages and a program’s functionality are not protected by copyright.¹ Nor are the ideas and principles behind a program’s interfaces.²
• Anyone with the right to use a program may observe, study and test how it works, without the rightholder’s permission.³
• Where it is needed to make an independently created program work with others, a program’s code may be reproduced and decompiled without the rightholder’s permission.⁴
• Licence terms that try to forbid this are null and void.⁵
• Studying, taking apart or testing a product that is publicly available or lawfully owned is a lawful way to learn how it works under EU trade secrets law.⁶

We work within the conditions EU law sets. We only study software we have the right to use, and only where the information we need is not already available. We use what we learn only to make files work across programs. We do not copy anyone’s code, and we do not build copies of anyone’s programs.⁷

We are based in the EU

UniCAD is based in the European Union, and our work is carried out there, so EU law and its protections apply to it. As a rule, anyone based in an EU member state can only be sued in the courts of that member state.⁸

We will not stop

People should be able to open, edit and move the files they own and rely on. We will not stop this work, whatever it costs us.

DMCA notices

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is United States law. We do not respond to DMCA notices, and we do not accept correspondence about DMCA or other copyright matters.