What happens if a story is not copy righted If a person makes a story up and doesn't copyright it can anyone copy it and then copyright it themselves?
Copyright exists the instant the “story” is placed in “tangible” form Tangible form means written on paper or on a computer or recorded etc. In some jurisdictions, tangible form isn’t needed and a spoken piece has copyright protection even if it’s never recorded. It’s been that way virtually worldwide for at least 30 years since the US adopted that method in 1978.
If it was illegal to make the entire copy, it is illegal to copy half the file. See also, e.g., Basic Books v. Kinko's Graphics Corp., 758 F. Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y. 1991) In response to the question of whether moving it to someone else's servers makes a difference: it is the act of copying, not the possession of the copy, that is the violation of copyright law. As for the copy a service assists someone to make, contributory liability would be the issue. You don't need to be the person making the copies to be contributing to the infringement--material contribution to the copying process and knowledge of infringement run a serious risk of creating contributory liability. If seriously considering such a service as a business model someone would need to consult a copyright expert with technical knowledge or pay counsel with technical knowledge for a good bit of time to do some research. There are major civil and criminal consequences if the industry or the government decides to go after a service doing this, so legal expenses would be a significant and important cost of doing business that would significantly increase barriers to entry. In addition, the service would likely be in violation of its agreement with storage vendors, who would want to minimize their legal exposure and might well discontinue the service when they learned what it was doing.
You cannot create derivative works without permission of the copyright holder (even if you create it and keep it to yourself). Further, you cannot distribute derivative works without permission of the copyright holder. That's a general principle that always applies. Since there is a license, you need to read that license carefully and determine under which conditions you have permission to create derivative works, and to distribute them. Your book would be considered a derivative work. In some situations, like commenting on a work, parody and some others, you would have a defense if you are quoting tiny parts of the work. But generally, if you find it unfair that your 200 page needs to be licensed because you used two pages from an open source source, you either do without those two pages, or you find the author and ask for permission under a different license. Note that facts are not copyrightable. So if the wikipedia page contains facts and isn't just made up, you can read it ten times, memorise all the facts, and maybe tell the facts to someone who you pay to write a similar article.
I don't see how. Remember that a license is a contract where the author gives permission to copy (modify, redistribute, remix, etc) a copyrighted work, provided that the licensee fulfills the stated conditions. If the license is not in effect, then we revert to the default situation under copyright law, which is that the potential licensee has no rights to copy the work. (Not counting particular instances of copying which are permitted under fair use and similar exceptions - I presume that's not what you have in mind, or the whole question is moot.) In this case, the conditions include that the licensee must credit the author under their chosen pseudonym. The licensee can't get out of that obligation simply because they find it distasteful or objectionable for whatever reason. If they don't want to do it, then they should not accept the license in the first place, and so refrain from copying the work. (Of course, if the author is offering the CC license in hopes of encouraging reuse of the work, then this may not be a desirable outcome for the author, so they might want to think twice about their choice of pseudonym.) Even if the author's pseudonym were something that would actually be illegal to quote (say, because it is obscene), I don't think it lets the licensee off the hook. A contract with illegal terms is void, so legally it is as if there is no license at all, and we revert to the default in which there is no right to copy. A question was raised in comments about the word &quot;reasonable&quot;. I don't know of case law where this has been tested, so I can only speculate: The context suggests that &quot;reasonable&quot; is intended to refer to the means of attribution (for instance, where the attribution should appear in a piece of source code or documentation), not to the pseudonym. There's a legal principle that the specific governs over the general, and the requirement to credit the author by a particular pseudonym is clearly more specific than the general requirement of &quot;reasonableness&quot;. It seems clear that the author, who is the one offering these terms, didn't intend for the general term &quot;reasonable&quot; to render meaningless their request for the use of a specific pseudonym; if they had, why would they have bothered to put it in? On the flip side, there's the principle of contra proferentem, that ambiguities in a contract should be resolved in the favor of the party that didn't draft it - here, the licensee. But it's hard to argue that this is really ambiguous; it seems quite clear what the author wants. Of course, the author can circumvent the whole issue, if they're worried, by licensing the work instead under a modified version of the CC license in which the word &quot;reasonable&quot; is removed. After all, there is nothing particular magical about CC's language: the contract is whatever the author and the licensee agree to, and they're just using the pre-written CC license as a convenience to streamline their negotiations.
This is known as "film novelization"(For example, the novelizations of the Star Wars movies are film novelizations, created under license), and is copyright infringement unless made under a license from the copyright holder. Specifically, you would be making a derivative work of the original, by changing the medium. One of the rights provided by copyright is the right to control the transference from one medium into another. This, in my (non-lawyer) opinion, is unlikely to be found as fair use. There are four test factors for determining fair use(source), decided on a case by case basis: Transformative Character of the Derivative Work: Unlikely to be found in your favor, as nothing is transformed ("I don't change anything, the name are the same, everything is the same, it's just a conversion to textual form"). Nature of the Original Work: A narrative entertainment film, thus unlikely to be found in your favor. Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Taken: You've taken all of it; not in your favor. Effect on the Potential Market: You are essentially providing a free version of what copyright holders can often charge for; negative effect on their potential market. Not in your favor.
In the US, copyright is granted automatically when content is created, so party A owns the copyright to the work. Party B has filed a fraudulent copyright registration, attempting to claim ownership of a work they did not create and do not own. This does not give them ownership rights to the work. Party A may need to go to court to prove their ownership of the work and have the copyright office issue a cancellation of copyright registration, since party B should not be the registered copyright holder of the work. In theory, one cannot register a copyright they do not own in the first place, and B's fraudulent registration does not somehow grant them legal rights to the original work. Of course, this will be a matter for the courts to decide.
It would be terribly risky for you to simply link another company's terms of service. What if they take their server down? What if they change their terms? You would not even know when exactly the changes were made. Copying their terms means you might run into copyright issues on the text. Either pay a lawyer to write your ToS for you, or see if you can find something in the public domain.
It is not possible to say that this is generally fair use, although sometimes it would be. A copy for personal use is still a copyright right violation on its face, and fair use does not categorically exclude non-commercial or personal use of copyrighted works. It is a highly fact specific inquiry. The likelihood of anyone discovering that you have done so and deciding to sue over it is slight, but that doesn't mean that there isn't potential copyright infringement liability. Compare this to speeding. People do it all the time, and even driving one mile per hour above the speed limit is still a traffic violation. But it is rare for less serious violations to be ticketed.