Book out of print - copyright? I wrote a math book and published it with a publishing company in Germany. It went out of print after 12 years. The company still holds the rights and does not allow anybody to print or publish it. I talked to them, but they don't see any possibility to make available to the public anymore. I do not have financial interest in the book - I just want it to be available to gifted students whom it was written for. Do I have any chance to make it available, against the will of the publishing company?
The answer will depend on the license you entered into with the publisher. Assuming that he has an exclusive license, there is no way you can publish the same work again against the will of the publisher or his successor. His right under the license will come to an end 70 years after the author or last co-author has passed away. What you can do is to create a new work that is so distinct that it does not infringe the right of the licensee, the publisher. If the new is original enough, you will have a new copyright.
A translation is a devivative work - the copyright owner has the exclusive right to these So, yes, translation is prima facie copyright infringement. Strictly speaking, if you translate it, it's a derivative work because you exercised creativity in making the translation; what Google translate does is not a derivative work, it's a copy because there is no creativity. Either way, only the copyright owner can do (or authorise) this. Whether it's legal or not depends on if what you are doing falls within one of the exceptions to the applicable copyright law such as fair use or fair dealing. Attributing the original author does not, of itself, allow translation. Additionally, I'm not able to find the copyright documentation for the site link I provided above. What is "copyright documentation"? Copyright exists the moment a work is created and no further documentation is required. Essentially, I could translate the whole documentation by myself to avoid this problem. No, you can't - see above. If copy-pasting the google translate is illegal, then exactly how much must I edit, move around sentences, change words, and such until the text is no longer plagiarized? All of it. If you were, based on your own knowledge of the software, to write a manual without any copying o the existing manual, that would not be copyright infringement. Is this plagiarism or copyright infringement? It's copyright infringement - plagiarism is an academic misconduct issue not a legal one. where can I check the copyright for the above link? The site you linked has "Copyright © 2020 Acquia, Inc. All Rights Reserved" in the bottom left corner which identifies the copyright holder, the date and prohibits all copying ("all rights reserved"). This isn't necessary but it is helpful. If you really want to do this, contact Acquia, Inc and ask for permission.
You can make as many &quot;manual copies&quot; of math homework for yourself as you like. The seemingly arbitrary number of &quot;7&quot; came into being because with the invention and popularity of devices for copying, private persons could make copies without considerable loss of quality. As it was impossible to control who made a copy and whom it was given to, a compromise was found: buying a copying machine (tape recorder, cd burner, dvd burner) or empty media (empty cassette tapes, empty CDs) came with an extra fee on top to be paid by the consumer, that would go to the copyright holders in general, with the assumptions that that would cover the &quot;normal, uncontrollable, private between friends&quot; copying. Like if you burn your mom a CD. Or gift your girlfriend a mix tape. Or copy a page of the book and hand out the excercise to your two study buddies. So there was a court decision that &quot;more than seven&quot; was more than what you would normally consider a private copy covered by this fee. If you make more than seven copies of a cassette for example, it would be okay to assume that you no longer did that &quot;for a close friend&quot;. Obviously, copying something from a book as you describe, by writing it down with a pencil on a notepad, is in no way &quot;a lossless copy&quot;. Even if you type it into an app, manually copying something into another medium is not lossless. Ever. It is also for your very personal use, you don't give it to anyone, not even close friends. So yes, you can make as many copies as you like, for yourself. If one breaks, and you make another, that is fine. If one breaks every day and you need 700 over the course of two years? Fine. But if you made 700 exact copies to give them to your &quot;700 closest friends&quot;, that is not how the law thinks &quot;closest friends&quot; work. That is where the arbitrary number 7 comes from.
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.
If the blog author holds the copyright on the ebook, they can distribute the ebook anyway they choose, either via download from Github or elsewhere, or sell it in an online store. They hold the copyright, they alone can decide how to distribute it. If they also sell the ebook in the Microsoft press Store, they may have an agreement with the store to also allow their own free downloads; it's hard to say without knowing the agreement. If there are ebooks on Githb available for viewing or download, the owner of the Github page should hold copyright of the ebook, both 1) for their own protection against copyright infringement, and 2) to not break GitHub's TOS against copright infringement: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-copyright-infringement-and-dmca-policy
There is a good chance that the letter in question is in the public domain. Prior to 1978, the copyright laws were very different. Also, if it was published in 1963 or earlier and there was an initial claim of copyright but the copyright was not renewed, it would also be in the public domain. A convenient table summarizing when various pertinent categories of works enter the public domain can be found here. It might be possible to construe depositing the work with the Library of Congress as either a "publication" of the work (which if it happened before 1964 would put it in the public domain), or as a relinquishment of the copyright to the public domain, although I am not a specialist familiar with the legal effect of different forms of donations to the Library of Congress and it could depend upon the facts and circumstances of that particular donation to the Library of Congress. If worse came to worse, I imagine it might be possible to seek a declaratory judgment that your use was a fair use with substituted service on the heirs, and seek a default judgment, although that would not be optimal. The general problem that you face is that the work in question is what is called an "orphan work". Many other countries have special procedures to allow the use of orphan works, but the U.S. has resisted such legislation except for a narrow exception applicable only to libraries and archives at 17 U.S.C. § 108.
YES, if you can get an image of it, you can use it A work that old is not under copyright protection in any country in the world. Under US law any work published in 1924 or before (as of 2019) is in the public domain. Unpublished works may be protected for up to 120 years after creation under US law. But no work that is over 600 years old has any copyright protection. In any case, merely owning the physical work does not mean owning the copyright. In the case of a work sufficiently recent that it is under copyright, say from the 1970s, the copyright initially belongs to the artist. If the artist sells or gives the painting to a museum (or anyone else), the artist retains the copyright unless that is explicitly included in the deal, in a written agreement. If the artist dies, the copyright is inherited, just as any other property that the artist leaves, as directed by will or law. If a museum owns a painting that is out of copyright, it can restrict access to it and prevent people from photographing or copying it, because it can restrict what people do on its property. But if an exact copy (known as a "slavish copy") gets out, the museum has no copyright in it, because making a slavish copy does not create an original, copyrightable work under US law. See the case of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999) and Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) The law may be different in non-US countries, but the reasoning of the Bridgeman case has bene followed elsewhere. A "slavish" copy is one that attempts to reproduce the original as exactly as possible, without adding or removing or changing anything. A photo of a painting in a frame on a stand with people standing beside it is not a slavish copy. The images of art one sees in books on art are usually slavish copies. So are the images one sees on museum web sites, as a rule. The term implies that the copyist had no more freedom than a slave in making the copy. At least that is the metaphor. Slavish copies do not get separate copyrights because they are not original works. Photos of 3D works such as sculptures require choice of angle, lighting, etc, sufficient t make them original works -- no two photographers will produce quite the same image of a sculpture. But some courts have ruled that wire-frame models of 3D works of art are slavish copies and not protected by copyright.
It does not matter whether the document is authentic, because it is true, by law. Under copyright law, you must have permission of the copyright holder to copy any protected work (original creative work not created as a work of the US, as an example under US law). This is true whether or not the copyright holder tells you that copying requires permission. A matter for more concern is &quot;false permission&quot;, where a person without the right to grant permission utters something that the courts would usually interpret as being &quot;permission&quot;, for example releasing a Harry Potter book under CC-0. The legal requirement is that you have actual permission, not that a prohibition was not communicated to you. It is in your interest to know whether the actual person making available a work under some license actually has the right to grant a license. But there is no way to know for certain who holds copyright. You can, however, attempt to determine that a work has been registered with the US copyright office, looking here. Works are still protected when not registered, so failing to find a copyright registration does not guarantee that the work is &quot;open access&quot;. It would tell you who the registered copyright holder is. There is no &quot;innocent infringement&quot; defense, but under §504(c)(2), your liability for statutory damages can be reduced to as little as $200, if you can prove that there were no indications that the work is protected.