out of print board game - scan of board permitted? There is a simple children's board game that is apparently out of print. May I make a color scan of the board and include it in a scholarly article? May I include the scan in a blog post? I want to include a visual and description of the basic game, and then describe variants that help a special learner with basic math skills. I acquired this game from some second hand store. It is in English but the box says it was manufactured in Spain in 1985. The name of the company is "Sallent Hermanos". What might make this a little tricky is that the board features Disney characters. The box says copyright-symbol 1985 Disney. It also displays "Educa". I tried a search, among other places, at http://www.educaborras.com/ -- nothing coming up anywhere.
First off, the work is almost certainly not in the public domain in the US. Works are generally copyrighted upon creation or publication, but in this case the work was probably explicitly copyrighted. The fact that a work is out of print generally has no bearing on its copyright status. US copyright law changed several times in the last century. The 1985 copyright year means the board game was probably published then, and it's since it's a Disney copyright it's a corporate work, which would give it a copyright term of 95 years, meaning that it should be covered under copyright until 2080. See this factsheet on copyright from the US Copyright office. Works Created on or after January 1, 1978 For works made for hire and anonymous and pseudonymous works, the duration of copyright is 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter International laws will vary, but many countries adhere to the Berne Convention, which means that international laws will probably be at least similar. Either way, the work isn't very old from an intellectual property perspective. Fair use is an exception to copyright law that allows portions of copyrighted works to be used without permission or compensation in certain circumstances; academic or scholarly use is one of them. Generally, your use of the work has to be the minimum necessary amount to serve your purposes, and cannot harm the commercial value of the work. (The fact that the work is out of print may help with the latter.) The problem with fair use is that it's always determined on a case by case basis. The only way to know for sure if a particular use is fair use is to wait for the copyright holder to sue you and then make a fair use defense in court. I was going to suggest that you discuss this with the editor of your journal, but re-reading your question it looks like you're planning to publish to a personal blog rather than an academic journal. In the end, it's up to you (or your attorney, if you choose to hire one) to analyze the relevant legal concepts and rules and decide if and how much of the work to use.
Most games have a TOS to playing that include provisions such as sales of in game items through out of game currencies (i.e. real world money changes hands for digital product or account). I believe Pokemon does have this as part of the TOS which could get you and potential customers banned from competition and possibly the modern online trade features, but am unable to look at the current TOS to verify. It should not be hard to find such a document and read for yourself.
Prompted by this recent similar question, I've revisited this question and deleted my original answer as it was completely off the mark. This is its replacement. It is illegal, and it turns out to be an international standard in the Berne Convention. Article 16 in full: (1) Infringing copies of a work shall be liable to seizure in any country of the Union where the work enjoys legal protection. (2) The provisions of the preceding paragraph shall also apply to reproductions coming from a country where the work is not protected, or has ceased to be protected. (3) The seizure shall take place in accordance with the legislation of each country. Your scenario falls squarely within point (2) and the imported George Orwell book is to be treated as an infringing copy within the UK. The implementing UK legislation for (2) can be found in Section 27(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
I think it is probably public domain. I would suggest contacting Jon Mulvaney at the Criterion Collection. They recently remastered "The Kid" and will know all about the rights for public showings. Also, if you want to show their remastered version, which is very high quality, they can explain the process.
The reason is 17 USC 106: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following... (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work The original picture is the underlying protected work. The ASCII reproduction is a derivative work. If you get permission to make the derivative work, it is okay. Otherwise, it is copyright infringement. There is an escape clause, "fair use", which amounts to taking a chance that you won't be sued and then arguing that you didn't do them any prohibited harm. If you make any money off of the game, you have a major strike against you. I suggest reading the fair use FAQ; basically, it is really hard to know how a fair use defense will fare, but based on prior cases, I'd say it's infringement, not fair use.
I don't know the specifics of this invention, but it's important to remember that the novelty and non-obviousness of an invention is made as of the date of the patent application (or earlier priority date, not applicable here). In this case, that would be September 5, 1979. So you'd have to look specifically at what art existed as of that date (actually, one year prior to that date) and show that the invention was obvious and not novel in light of that prior art. It would take more than a general claim that it's obvious, for example. The practices followed by the PTO in determining novelty and obviousness in accordance with the law is set out in the Manual of Patent Examination Procedure, chapter 700 ("Examination of patents"). You might find that an interesting read. The current release (Ninth Edition, Revision 07.2015) is here; the edition in effect in 1979 would have been the Fourth Edition, here. As an aside, the term of the patent is not 20 years from publication. The term under today's law is 20 years from initial filing date, not from publication. Had that law been in effect for this patent, it would have expired in September 5, 1999 (which it actually did, as noted below). Prior to June 8, 1995, US patent term was based on the date of issue plus 17 years; in this case to January 5, 1999. But under terms of the 1995 law, any patent applied for prior to June 8, 1995 got the greater of those two terms; so we're back to September 5, 1999 again. (And just for completeness, there is also the matter of periodic maintenance fees that today need to be paid to keep a patent in force; but that didn't start until December 1980, and wouldn't have applied to this patent, which was filed prior to the institution of maintenance fees.)
You are wrong that they never get into legal trouble. It isn't terribly common but it certainly happens to those that get relatively prominent. Many of the folks doing the copyright infringement are judgement proof. It makes little sense for Disney, for example, to sue some guy living in his parents' basement for uploading a clip of their movie when that guy has no assets. Financially, it wouldn't be worth the cost of a lawyer. Many of the folks doing the copyright infringement are in jurisdictions that look the other way. If you're a Russian citizen pirating content owned by American companies, the Russian authorities aren't going to cooperate and arrest you and the American companies likely can't recover any judgement they'd get because you don't have any assets in America. There is a whack-a-mole problem. If there are hundreds of people posting pirated content to Facebook and each one is running hundreds of pages, that's tens of thousands of pages posting content. By the time you identify and close all of them, the pirates will have created tens of thousands of new pages. There is a cat-and-mouse problem. Copyright owners have automated tools to scan for their IP to issue takedown notices. Piraters know this so they modify the video (posting it as a mirror image or adding some additional video elements) in order to evade the automated tools. If copyright owners have to manually identify pirated content, it's realistically not cost effective to do so. The humans finding that content would cost more than the business loses in revenue to pirates. Tracking down the actual human/ business behind the copyright infringement is often a fair amount of work and may involve motions in courts in multiple countries. That work tends not to be highly prioritized by law enforcement. If you're a small fish, it is unlikely that anyone would go to the effort of unmasking you in order to sue.
Details depend on the juristiction. For that, consult a lawyer if you plan to publish your app anywhere. But generally, even simple texts from exercises can be covered by copyright. Compare song lyrics, which are not much longer (and might not involve more creative thought than a good exercise ...). For vocabulary lists, it gets more tricky, but those can be covered as well if the assembly of the list was a creative effort. So if you simply list the 1,000 most common worlds in English and their translation, you are possibly fine, but if the words are divided into units and lessons, that's creative work.