Is it legal to copy the KJV? If I understand correctly, the King James Version of the Bible is copyrighted in the UK but nowhere else. I live in the US. If I upload a copy of it to my Web site (which is hosted in the US), is that legal? Can I travel to the UK?
According to the page &quot;Rights and Permissions: KJV&quot; from Cambridge University: Rights in The Authorized Version of the Bible (King James Bible) in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown and administered by the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press. The reproduction by any means of the text of the King James Version is permitted to a maximum of five hundred (500) verses for liturgical and non-commercial educational use, provided that the verses quoted neither amount to a complete book of the Bible nor represent 25 per cent or more of the total text of the work in which they are quoted, subject to the following acknowledgement being included: Scripture quotations from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press When quotations from the KJV text are used in materials not being made available for sale, such as church bulletins, orders of service, posters, presentation materials, or similar media, a complete copyright notice is not required but the initials KJV must appear at the end of the quotation. That copyright protection does not apply in the US, nor in any place ouside the UK (or possibly the British Commonwealth). If a person resident in the US uploads a copy of the KJV to a site hosted in the US, no US copyright has been infringed, nor has any US law has been broken. If the site is accessible from the UK, a suit could be brought under UK law for infringement of Crown Copyright. (Whether the relevant UK authorities would choose to bring such a suit I cannot say.) If there was a judgement for the plaintiff, any property that the defendant (the uploader) has in the UK could be subject to seizure for pay the judgement. The UK court could ask a US court to enforce the judgement, but in this case I am fairly sure the US court would refuse, because of the First Amendment. The up loader would not be subject to arrest in the UK, because this is not a criminal matter. But if the uploader brought any property into the UK, it might be subject to seizure to pay the existing judgement. To respond to a question in the comments, the KJV is not protected by ordinary copyright law, but by a Royal Prerogative Monopoly, a relic of the period when the Crown licensed all printing and distribution of religious works. See &quot;A Four Century Copyright: Free the King James!&quot; and sources linked from that page.
But while some libraries allow unrestricted use of their Public Domain content, others do not and limit the use of their copies to Non-Commercial use. It is my understanding that NC only applies to the digital copy, not the work itself. Your understanding is correct. An ancient text, or one long out of copyright, does not get new protection by creating an image of the text. At most the image itself is protected, not the underlying text. In the US, and other jurisdictiosn that follow the rule of the 1999 Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp case there is no copyright protection on the image because it has no original content. Some EU courts have indicated that they will be following the logic of bridgeman. To the best of my knowledge no EU decision grants copyright protection to an otherwise out-of-copyright work because of its presence in a digital library or collection. However, if a person gained access to a digital library or collection subject to a TOS agreement which includes &quot;no commercial use&quot; terms and then published a text from it commercially, that person might be subject to a breech of contract or similar suit by the library. Such a suit would need to include proof of damages.
I presume the input is text: "my original text" is assumed to mean you wrote (created) the text. That means that you hold the copyright to the text, and only you can authorize a derivative work (such as a synthesized recording). Therefore, you hold the copyright to the recordings as well. The crucial consideration governing that right is that you "created" the work, meaning that there is a modicum of creativity. However, if you did not create the text and your only function is to host an automatic process where users can create a synthesized recording, then whoever created the text has the right to the text and derivative works (i.e. the synthesized output). Automated processes like (unassisted) OCR or wav-to-mp3 conversion would not count as being "original", nor would automatic text-to-speech, so you don't gain copyright just from making an automatic work-creating tool available. On the assumption that the conversion involves a component of Chrome, you can use the service per the terms of service, though you cannot "reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services". This might limit the extent to which you could make this conversion available to others, depending on how, exactly, you could do such a thing (does it duplicate the service?). As they say, Google owns all legal right to the Services, but Google obtains no right from you for any content created through their service. There is no restriction in the TOS against using the service for commercial purposes. Even if there were, that would not assign copyright in the recording to anyone else, it would just mean they could sue you for violating the TOS.
This appears to be very clear to me: "NPR does not allow other websites to post our content..." I cannot think of a more clear way to say "Do not reproduce our content on your site." Since you asked about licensing the right to reproduce their content, and they flatly ignored your request, I think it is safe to assume that they are not interested in licensing that right to you, even for a fee. This is also consistent with their "NPR does not allow [any] other websites to post..." language. It is always the copyright holder's right to refuse to offer any particular person (or all persons generally) a license, no matter what payment they might offer. (With the exception of statutory licenses, which in the U.S. exist only for recording covers of musical works.) They have also ignored your request to recompense them for infringement already performed. If in the future they decide to take legal action against you for your past infringement (hugely unlikely that such a hassle would be worthwhile for NPR) or seek any out of court settlement (again, quite unlikely they will care enough), I'm sure they will let you know. As they've said in their email, you are welcome to link to NPR's content. You are, of course, not welcome to spread misinformation or lies about NPR by claiming something like, "Look at this wonderful article that NPR wrote purely for us, at our personal request," or "NPR thinks that In Home Teaching Agency XXX is a great company, so we built a curriculum around their content," when NPR has never said any such thing. Any legal issue around linking would probably be a trademark offense, by wrongfully suggesting that NPR endorses you, or by misrepresenting yourself as an agent of NPR. If you don't do either of things, and just say, "Here's an article on [subject X] published by NPR," you're probably fine. If you want to be very thorough, you could include a disclaimer on your site like, "In Home Teaching Agency XXX is not a licencee or partner of NPR. Links to NPR articles are included for educational purposes only," or similar. This seems pretty excessive to me, since a reasonable person won't assume that linking to an article from a major news source suggests a partnership, but I suppose it couldn't hurt to include such a disclaimer.
There is no general prohibition against taking down material, even non-infringing material, which is posted by some person, but there is a risk to the service provider. Abstracting away from the specifics of github, a Provider has some agreement with the User whereby User rightfully makes Stuff available on Provider's site. Arbitrarily removing Stuff (in violation of the usage agreement) may cause damage to User, who may sue Provider, and Provider will avoid that if possible. DMCA protects Provider from copyright infringement suits by Victim, providing the proper DMCA procedure is followed, and it allows Provider to remove Stuff without fear of getting sued by User (17 USC 512(g)). This protection is not available if the takedown notice is not proper. (As a case in point, the entire series of Harry Potter books is still out there freely on the internet, because only the rights holder can demand a takedown, and the rights holder seems to not be concerned).
A statement by a fictional character is part of the fiction, and so is normally protected by copyright. A short exclamation such as &quot;You are not prepared!&quot; might be ruled to be too short and not sufficiently original to be protected if it were used separately, but that would apply just as much to a short statement that was not a quote from a character. But something like one of Gandalf's speeches on &quot;mercy and pity&quot; to Frodo in Chapter 2 (&quot;The Shadow of the past&quot;) in book 1 of The Lord of the Rings would clearly be protected. The longer and the more distinctive such a text is, the more clearly it would be protected. Whether it is put in the mouth of a character or is part of the narration makes no significant difference. Note, in a copyright sense a statement does not &quot;belong to a particular universe&quot;, rather it belongs to a copyright owner, often the author, or in the case of a video game quite likely thy publisher. As this comment by Kevin mentions, and as I should have mentioned, reproducing a short quotation from a work of fiction, particularly if properly attributed, is quite likely to be fair use. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? for more specific details. See also the threads tagged fair use If a quote is used for a different purpose than the original, in what is called a &quot;transformative&quot; manner in copyright cases, then it is more likely to be held to be fair use. The smaller of a percentage of the source item the quote is, the more likely it is that it will be considered to be a fair use. The less the use of a quote serves as a replacement for the source, or harms the market for the source, the more likely it is to be considered a fair use. See the links above for more detail.
It's legal as long as you follow these guidelines: They [The Cached Files] are created only for the purpose of viewing (In Your case listening) content The copies do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holders. The creation of the copies does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the works. Source: http://www3.ebu.ch/contents/news/2014/06/eu-court-rules-on-legality-of-in.html
Yet I publicly wear shirts with copyrighted designs all the time. I'm unclear about this; do you mean T-shirts you have made yourself using copyrighted images or T-shirts you have bought? If the former then it is a prima facie breach and you could be sued by the copyright holder. You would probably not be as it would be impracticable. If the latter then there are 2 possibilities: The manufacturer/distributer/retailer chain all hold valid licences to put the image on a T-shirt and display it in the usual way so there is no breach involved. The manufacturer/distributer/retailer chain does not hold a valid licence in which case there is a breach and the copyright holder would target, say Wall-Mart rather than you. what about displaying ... works of art in my yard? Notwithstanding that it can be viewed from a public space, your yard is not public; therefore this is not public display.