Does the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence allow you to specify exactly how attribution must be given? Prompted by this Meta Stack Exchange discussion Stack Exchange uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license for user contributions. But in the footer of every page is a link to a blog post specifying how attribution should be given. Some of the restrictions specified are: Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine. Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345) Show the author names for every question and answer Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username) By “directly”, I mean each hyperlink must point directly to our domain in standard HTML visible even with JavaScript disabled, and not use a tinyurl or any other form of obfuscation or redirection. Furthermore, the links must not be nofollowed. The relevant section (4c) of the licence itself says: If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution (&quot;Attribution Parties&quot;) in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with Ssection 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., &quot;French translation of the Work by Original Author,&quot; or &quot;Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author&quot;). The credit required by this Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors. For the avoidance of doubt, You may only use the credit required by this Section for the purpose of attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties. In the Meta Stack Exchange discussion it is argued that Stack Exchange are trying to assert restrictions which are not part of the CC BY-SA licence: To hyperlink each author, in addition to the page itself To use a direct link rather than a shortener To not use nofollow Does the CC BY-SA licence allow primary distributors to specify restrictions like these, or can secondary distributors ignore them and still be compliant with the licence?
The Stack Exchange "requirement" of a particular type of attribution is unlikely to be enforceable, given the terms of the CC BY-SA license. The actual Creative Commons license, the part that governs the relationship between the parties, is the "legal code" license agreement. The CC BY-SA agreement contains two clauses relevant to the form of attribution. One, as the question points out, is paragraph 4(c), which states that "credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner." This language is much less restrictive than the StackExchange blog post. The other relevant clause is the last clause of the agreement, paragraph 8(e), which is a standard integration clause: This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You. In other words, any changes to the license, which would include any additional restrictions on the nature of the attribution that may be given (besides the "reasonable manner" specified in the license) are effective only if both parties agree to do so in writing. The specific law applied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction is going to vary, but in general, in the United States, when you have a fully integrated agreement such as this license, a court will not look at anything outside the four corners of the agreement to determine the parties' rights and duties. If a court finds this to be a fully integrated agreement, and refuses to consider "parol evidence," meaning statements outside of the contract, then StackExchange can post a page asking people to attribute content in a particular way, but no, they cannot require it.
Section 108(a) is the most useful for an infringer who posts an entire copy of a protected work in public. Subsections(b,c) require that the copy not be made available outside the premises, which precludes internet posting; (d) requires a user request to make a copy; (e) applies only to items that are off the market and transferred to a specific user; (h) allows more copying in the last 20 years of the period when a work is protected (not applicable here). Subsection (a) allows a library or archive to make one copy of a work, as long as there is no commercial advantage to making the copy, the library is relatively public (it might restrict access to bona fide researchers), and a copyright notice is included: this has the fewest restrictions on copying. The internet downloader is not a library or an archive, so the downloader is not granted any permission under 108 to make a copy. Under 108(a) a library can make no more than one copy available, but every uploading or downloading is "making a copy". A library would be contributorily liable for the illegal downloadings of their "customers". It is difficult to know exactly what one can get away with under 17 USC 107 a.k.a. "fair use". I am fairly sure that posting a copy of a contemporary book in the open is not "fair use" even if the intent is to make it possible for dummies to study chemistry: such copying is not at all transformative, totally unlimited, and provides a significant market substitute for the protected work.
The code is copyrighted. You are not given any permission to use or copy any part of it, nor to create a derivative work based on it. There is no way for you to "make the copyright null". The code was copyrighted in 2005, and the copyright will not expire until 70 years after the death of the author, under US law. The period would vary in some other countries, but in no country that I know of will it expire in the next few years. That the author is dead, or the publisher out of business, does not change this legally. Someone, probably the author's heir, or perhaps whoever bought the remains of the publisher's business, will own the copyright. However, the ideas and programming techniques shown and discussed in the book are not protected, and you may use them freely to write programs, commercial or non-commercial. You need not even acknowledge the book as a source of ideas, although to do so would be nice. Of course, since the author is dead and the publisher not active, if you were to infringe the copyright by copying code from thsi book, there is a reasonable chance that no one would notice, but if someone did notice, the current owner of the copyright could sue you for infringement, and could perhaps win sizable damages. It would be safer to write your own original code using only the general ideas from the book. In future, do not ever assume that you can just take someone else's code (or other creative work, such as a book) and reuse it without permission, unless it is in the public domain, for example because it was published before 1923.
To the best of my understanding: US copyright law does not have anything in particular to say about credits of this nature, for the most part. The law doesn't even say that you have to credit people at all. It just says you have to get a license (i.e. &quot;permission&quot;) to use the item in question. Even that is only required when the work is not a &quot;work made for hire&quot; (i.e. any work by an employee of the production company, within the scope of their job). There are some weird situations where the law does require a credit (e.g. a compulsory license acquired under 17 USC 115 requires the licensee to preserve metadata identifying the original song and artist), but this is the exception rather than the rule. The exact wording and ordering of film credits (and TV/other credits) is typically the product of extensive negotiations between all of the people credited, the production company, and (in most cases) their respective unions. It is thus subject to contract law rather than copyright law. Copyright licenses usually mandate some sort of credit be given, except for certain specialized types of work such as ghostwriting (where the whole point is that you don't get credited). Some licenses are more flexible on this point than others. For example, Creative Commons licenses set out a specific list of things that must be included, and mandate that it must appear alongside other credits if there are any, but other than that, you can basically word and display the credit in any way that is &quot;reasonable.&quot; However, one-off private licenses will likely be much more specific and restrictive about how the credit is displayed. Speculating: It may be the case that different attorneys drafted different licensing agreements with different credit phrasings wholly by accident, or for no particular reason, simply due to a lack of direct coordination. In other words, nobody was actively trying to make sure all the credits matched, so they didn't.
The general rule under united-states law is that copyright is infringed when a copyrighted work, or any part of it, is copied or distributed without permission, or a new derivative work based on the copyrighted work is created or distributed without permission. There are several exceptions to this. There is, for example, a specific right to create a backup of a computer program to which one has lawful access. The best known and widest exception to copyright in US law is &quot;fair use&quot;. What use is a fair use is a highly fact-driven question: It cannot be answered in general, except by quoting the statutory provisions. There are no exact rules for what is and is not fair use that apply in all cases. There have been several detailed discussions of fair-use on this site, including https://law.stackexchange.com/a/66608/17500 not long ago. Note that fair use is a strictly US concept, and does not apply under any other country's law. Other countries have their own exceptions to copyright, which will cover some of the same cases as fair use, but not all of them, and will get to results by different routes. If hashes were distributed separately, to confirm the authenticity of a program, they would probably not be protected by copyright for lack of originality. Under US law, and particularly the Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) case there must be a &quot;minimal degree&quot; of creativity for something to be protected by copyright. The decision said: Many compilations consist of nothing but raw data—i.e. wholly factual information not accompanied by any original expression. On what basis may one claim a copyright upon such work? Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place. ... The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable: The sine qua non of copyright is originality. Since a hash or other digital signature can be computed automatically from the document to be signed (indeed that is its value), it is not creative and copying a hash alone would not be an infringement. Whether this would be true of other metadata depends on the exact nature of that data, and the degree of creativity that it represents. Without specific facts no judgement can be made, and making that kind of very specific judgement might be beyond the scope of this site. A comment said: Just because a work is copyrighted, doesn't mean every part of that work is copyrighted, ... I would put it that every part of a work is copyrighted, but some copying does not amount to infringement. Extracting facts and rewording them so that none of the expression is copied is not infringement. Extracting a completely non-creative part of a work and reproducing it is not infringement. Copying a limited amount for use in a review or commentary is often fair use, and fair use is not infringement. Video Games There is nothing in US law specific to video games. There is little that is specific to computer software, although the right to make a backup copy is protected. A good deal of case law has focused on the issue of temporary copies made while running a program, which does not seem relevant to this question. Other cases have focused on the protectability of user interfaces, and of APIs, also not relevant here. whether a work is packaged as a single file or as many related files should not affect its copyright protection. (I know of no case on that specific issue.) Whether copying a part of acomputer file is infringement or not would depend on the purpose of the copying, and on the effect or potential effect on the copyright holder, and perhaps on other factors. Copying a non-creative hash, as a way of detecting whether a file is modified or not, does not seem likely to be infringement, unless the holder could show harm, but no one knows for sure how a court would rule in such a case. Copyright does not protect facts, but it does protect the way in which facts are expressed, unless there is only one or a few such ways available to express such a fact. Copyright also may protect the selection and arrangement of facts, except where the arrangement is &quot;obvious&quot;. Placing facts in alphabetical order (as in a phone book) or chronological order (as in a timeline) has been held to be obvious and not protected. International Standards The question and a comment ask about international standards for copyright. In effect there are none. The only significant international agreement on copyright is the Berne Copyright Convention. That is a treaty to which almost every nation belongs, thus rendering the Universal Copyright Convention and other international copyright agreements obsolete. But the Berne Convention leaves details to national copyright laws. The making or authorizing of copies, and the authorizing of derivative works are part of copyright in every Bern-compliant country. Berne provides for exceptions to copyright, but leaves the details to national law. Moreover, there is no intentional court in which copyright claims can be made. Anyone wishing to sue for copyright infringement must do so in the courts of some specific country, and so all the case law which defines details on what is and is not infringement is national, not international. It should be noted that a copyright holder may sue in any country where infringing actions have occurred. When an allegedly infringing work is distributed over the web, that often means that a plaintiff may sue in almost any country, although enforcement will be limited if the defendant has no presence and no assets in the chosen country. Thus the copyright laws of multiple countries may be relevant to a particular case.
Although the exact answer should depend on the country you are, in general private copies of copyrighted works are allowed. General rules are: You need to have got the work in a legitimate way. That is, that you have purchased a copy of the work with permission from copyright owners or you have got the work from an act of public distribution authorised by copyright owners - if you got it from a website that is not making a copyright infringement itself, you are in the second case. That you don't make a collective or commercial use of the work. (I took these rules from Spanish Intellectual Property law (article 31), but most countries have similar rules, specially in the European Union. Anyway, the exact limits of private copying exception may differ). Since private copying might have an economic effect, some countries collect private copying levies to compensate copyright owners - probably you have already paid for those when purchasing the printer. Therefore, you can print a book downloaded from a website (unless the site is hosting the work without authorization of the copyright owners, as pirate sites do) for your own use. You can't sell the copies or made a collective use of them. Although reach of collective use might be hard to assess, I would suggest that if you want all the people in your class have the book, send them the link so that any one could print their own copy. Update about the USA As the OP has now specified now their country I update the answer with a comment, although an additional answer by anybody more knowledgeable on US law would be great. I'm quite sure that for practical purposes the result is that you can print such a book anywhere in the world. However, I don't know which laws regulates that in the US. Google doesn't return meaningful results for "private copy usa", so I suppose it is know there by another name. Furthermore, statutes in common law countries tend to be less explicit and there might be no case law applicable. For example, I nobody printing a copy of a pdf for himself to read at home has ever been challenged in court in the USA, there might be no explicit rule about the subject.
The notice has a lot to do with legacy requirements in the United States to claim the copyright to a work. Up until 1989, the copyright notice was required. Today, the statements are mainly maintained to protect against "innocent infringement" which might reduce what a content owner can get in court. What exactly do those terms entail? That the owner stated owns all rights and you may do nothing with the content. My biggest concern is this: by writing that, is the company claiming to own everything on the website, even potentially copyrighted user-submitted material? That's exactly what they are doing. Depending on the terms of the specific site, content contributors generally either assign copyright to the site owner or license the content in a way that allows the site owner to do exactly what they want with it. Site creators with the smarts or money to do it right/get someone to do it right usually state something like: Copyright [Site Owner] and contributors. Other sites (like this one) state specifically what they hold the copyright to: site design / logo © 2015 Stack Exchange Inc THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. CONSULT AN ATTORNEY REGARDING YOUR SPECIFIC SITUATION.
Probably Not The creator or owner of a piece of software does not in general have any copyright over the output when others run the software, unless that output is itself a derivative work of input supplied by the copyright owner, or forming part of the software. In this case the translation is a derivative work of the 19th century original, but that is assumed to be in the public domain. SAo google has no copyright on the resulting translation. But copyright protection is only available for &quot;original works of authorship&quot;. (See 17 USC 102 in the US, and similar laws elsewhere.) A machine-produced translation is not an original work, and it is surely not then work of the author of the overall book. However, the author would still have a copyright on the book as a whole. The legal situation is no different than if the author had simply quoted a 19th century work. One may incorporate public domain works into a later work, and that later work is still protected by copyright, provided that there is enough original contentr to make the work as a whole &quot;an original work of authorship&quot;. Others may use the PD [arts, or the original from which they are taken, but not the rest of the work (beyond what fair use would allow in any case). For example, I have made a number of posts here on LAW.SE. In several,of those I quoted sections from one of the numbers of The Federalist. That 19th century work is in the public domain. Anyone else may re-quote the passages I quoted from it. But that gives them no rights to use the rest of my work, except as the CC-BY-SA license or fair use permits. So the author would retain copyright on the book as a whole. But soemoen who merely quotes or uses the translated 19th century article but none of the original parts of the book would not be infringing that copyright. I say probably in the header, because I do not have any actual case-law to cite here. It is possible that some court has rules otherwise on the subject of the copyright on the output of a software tool, but I strongly doubt it.