Legal Issues

Identify any legal issues raised by your software. For example:

Is your software violating any licensing agreements? // List all third-party software you plan to use and ensure that you have the right to use as you plan.

Our software is subject to software agreements with software providers such as Google Cloud, Java (Oracle), Spring Boot, MySQL (Oracle), React (Facebook), and other libraries which are packaged. We will ONLY use libraries that are free to use for commercial purposes or are open source. Citations for all software will be given on a library page.

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Are there any intellectual property constraints placed by your client? or by the owner of some dataset you need to use? List them.

We will be using the US Department of Agriculture's FoodData central API. Their policies can be found here They state "USDA food composition data are in the public domain and they are not copyrighted. No permission is needed for their use. USDA would appreciate it if developers would list FoodData Central as the source of the data. And, when possible, USDA would like to see the product that uses the data or be notified of their use." We will comply with this by citing the data used on our library page.

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Can your users use your app to break the law? post copyright works on your webapp? steal information? etc.

Users are able to upload recipes and images to the platform. Their image or written material could violate The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) or other Federal laws such as those which govern images. The service would be protected under DCMA and Section 230 laws, our goal is to allow for reporting of such violations and swift removal if the claim is valid to remain in compliance. Users could use gathered profile information, but APIs will be restricted to prevent mass queries (scrubbing) and the usefulness of the public profiles is limited.