Why don&#39;t publishers release journal articles whose copyright have expired into Public Domain? Consider this journal article by John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who died in 1946 (the article in question was published in 1943). The journal (still published) is based in the UK, and thus, it should be subject to UK copyright law. According to UK law, the copyright of the work expires 70 years after the death of the author. For the case of Keynes, that is 2017. Similarly, the layout of the published edition has copyright for 25 years only. Thus, both copyrights have already expired. However, the article (and many other articles in a similar situation, as the journal was created in 1891) are not freely available. They can only be accessed through JSTOR, as all links redirect to it (e.g. this and this). JSTOR does not allow free access (as in freedom of speech), albeit has a restricted form of free access (as in free beer), after registration, only for three articles and lasting 14 days. Why does the publisher do not release the material to the public domain if the copyright has already expired? Do they have any obligation to do so, or it is a matter of active individuals/organisations to "exercise" that right? As such, can I request to them to give me access for free? As far as I understand, as a British resident (?), I am myself "entitled" to make that work available in the public domain, without infringing the copyright of the author or publisher.
You misunderstand the nature of copyright. Holding copyright allows you to decide how the work can be copied: there is no obligation on you to publish it if you don't want to. After your copyright expires you don't have to publish it either: the only thing that has changed is you can no longer prevent anyone making a copy. The lost works of Aristotle are in the public domain - if you can find them you can make as many copes as you like.
Derivative work The Kenku first appeared in Dungeon Magazine 27 in 1991 and appears to be an original work as far as I can tell. It, therefore, enjoys copyright protection until 70 years after the author dies - it seems unlikely that the author died before 1950 so the copyright has probably not expired, AFAIK, the author is, in fact, still alive. Your usage is what is known as a derivative work and making derivative works is one of the rights that copyright grants to the copyright holder. You can't do it without permission unless you have a fair use defence: you don't. If you call your Kenku a duck; it's still a Kenku This is the inverse of the well-known duck test much beloved of philosophers and employment-law judges but equally relevant to copyright-law judges. Changing one (or several or even many) aspects of a copyrighted work is still copyright infringement. You are free to write something inspired by the Kenku but once "it looks like a Kenku, swims like a Kenku, and quacks like a Kenku, then it probably is a Kenku".
To examine this further and answer your question, we need to look at Copyright (and fair use) as well as Defamation. Alas, I am unsure as to how taking legitimate headlines from around the world and attributing their source is 'fake news' - but I'll accept that it's 'fake news' for the purposes of exploring this topic. A lot of the potential (or motive) for a person or company to litigate against you will be context specific and detailed to how you have used their work and portray their journalists and characters - misquotes etc. As an exception to British copyright law, fair dealing is governed by Sections 29 and 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which outlines three instance where fair dealing is a legitimate defence: If the use is for the purposes of research or private study; If it is used for the purposes of criticism, review or quotation; Where it is utilised for the purposes of reporting current events (this does not apply to photographs) However, where you may come into problems is: A statutory definition for fair dealing does not exist; it will always be a matter of fact, degree and interpretation in every fair use case. Nor is there a percentage or quantitative measure to determine fair dealing. The Intellectual Property Office lists the key factors used to determine the validity of whether a particular dealing with a work is fair as follows: Has the use of the work impacted negatively on the market for the original work? If the creator or owner has lost potential revenue through the re-use of their work, it is not likely to be fair. Was it reasonable and necessary to use the amount of work that was taken? Also: Fair use for parody, caricature or pastiche The UK copyright law on fair use of works for the purposes of creating a parody or pastiche is also listed in Section 30A, Schedule 2 (2A) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. References to all here. Guidance from the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) states that fair use needs to be “fair and proportionate” and does not protect an individual from any other rights an author may have. Those other rights may involve claiming defamation if this material creates fake news and uses the names of real journalists or companies etc - and if they allege that your AI fake news has caused serious harm in any way to their reputation - they could sue you for breach of the Defamation Act 2013. All of this is entirely contextual however as to how your AI might display or make fake news and how Google caches it and displays it - and if it could be portrayed as 'real' or believable for example. You are also doing this at a time where 'anti fake news' law is evolving... and even though you say it's fake news for AI experiment purposes - it's a growing field of concern for many. (see here) Copyright law is a vast and evolving area - and nothing is clear cut. It really depends if a major news company didn't like what you were doing and took exception to it and issued challenges on many areas of law based on that.
There are three questions relevant to this issue: Who owned the copyright in the first place? Was the copyright transferred? If not, was a license given to the site to use the content? In general, under most countries' laws, the person who creates an original work owns the copyright. The person with the copyright has the right to copy and distribute the work, and the right to prevent others from doing so. In some cases, such as where a work is created as a "work for hire" by certain employees under certain circumstances, the initial copyright is held by a third party. You will need a lawyer familiar with your jurisdiction and your circumstances to determine if this is the case. Finally, even if you own the copyright, you can license others to use your content. This may be in an express written document, or it may be an implied license--implied, for instance, by the act of posting it on their blog. The existence and scope of such a license is, again, something that will have to be determined based on your country's specific laws and your specific situation. The bottom line is: if you submitted articles to that blog, you can't complain that they posted them. Depending on the license in effect, you might be able to get them taken down, or you might not. You need a lawyer, not the internet, to tell you what your rights are in this very specific case.
One big hole in any scheme that relies on copyright is that it could not preclude people talking about the previous content or talking about you. This is well established First Amendment law. For example, see Near v. Minnesota 283 U.S. 697 (1931), which holds that except in rare judicially established exceptions (relating to military information, obscenity, and inciting acts of violence), government censorship is unconstitutional. Thus, no statutory scheme could be used to prevent third parties who happened to have seen the material while it was freely available from re-iterating what they had seen, or talking about it, or talking about the author (you). People could even reproduce portions of the published content. Some types of reproduction would be protected as fair use in the US, especially if the reproduction is for the purpose of criticism. (17 USC 107, and this previous Law.SE answer) The closest approach would be to protect your work as trade secret, making sure that anyone that you share it with agrees to non-disclosure. But, if you "publish unique content under this pseudonym" there is no way to "arbitrarily or wholly revoke discussion about that content". If the cat gets out of the bag, while you may have remedies against the person who violated the non-disclosure agreement, you would not be able to prevent third-party discussion or reproduction.
There are jurisdictions that do not allow authors to place their work in the public domain, such as Germany. Main reason is the strict monistic approach the German copyright law bases on. Key feature of this approach is the concept that, in principle, the copyright/author’s right itself can neither be transferred to another person nor waived by the author herself. The German author’s right consists of two parts, the moral rights and the exploitation rights. The moral rights are – as a rule – personal rights that are bound to the person of the creator (or, after her death, her legal heirs), i.e. they can neither be transferred nor waived. Since moral and exploitation rights are considered as inseparable parts of the author’s right as a whole (monistic approach) the exploitation rights cannot – in principle – transferred or waived by contract as well. CC0 is supposed to get you as close to the public domain as possible in your legal system. CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not adapted to the laws of any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses.
Why would the method by which you transfer a item that has a copyright impact the copyright? You buy a new book at a new bookstore, a used book at a used bookstore, a used book at a garage sale, someone gives you a book, you find a book on the sidewalk, you steal a book from a store, you buy and download an ebook, you give an ebook to someone on a USB stick, you download an ebook via Bittorrent. The author's copyright - as well as the design copyright, and any book company trademarks - does not change in any of those scenarios. Copyright around most of the world - read Berne Convention (Wikipedia) - says that copyright exists at the moment of creation of a work, i.e. a work that you say is "100% yours". This has nothing to do with the way the work may be transmitted or stolen or downloaded. A work in the public domain can still be copyrighted in terms of cover artwork and design, annotations, etc. Read Welcome to the Public Domain - Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center You can say someone "owns" a book in the sense that they might have paid for it or it is personal property and one could justifiably call it theft if someone took it from them, but "owning" the physical or electronic copy in any sense doesn't mean you own the copyright. Read the copyright notice on a book or ebook; you get a license to read it, not ownership of it. Read What's the difference between Copyright and Licensing? - Open Source Stack Exchange. Sure, the TOS of a network can specify the ownership/licensing status of the files shared on such network. They will almost all explicitly say not to upload or share anything that will violate the copyright of that work. The TOS of a network could possibly say that anything that is uploaded is automatically licensed to them. A network could demand the reassignment of copyright upon upload, but that would have to be outlined in the TOS and is not simple. See Copyright Ownership and Transfers FAQs - Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center.
There is no copyright on the name of anyone. That certain people have been known as philosophers, and have put forth particular ideas are facts, not subject to copyright, as long as no one else's description of those ideas is copied or closely imitated. This is true in the US, and also in most of not all ,other countries. Rights in the image and likeness of a person vary among US states, and also between different countries. In most US states any such rights end with the persona's death, or only continue for a few years after death (10 years in some cases). The year of birth is not, as far as I know relevant. The exact length of such rights should be checked if any person being pictured is alive or has died fairly recently. Such rights can protect against the commercial use of even an original (not copied) representation of the person's likeness. About Einstein Greenlight claims to represent Hebrew University of Jerusalem and to hold marketing rights on images of Einstein for publicity purposes. This is mentioned in &quot;Who Owns Einstein's Face?&quot; From The Atlantic Hebrew University of Jerusalem sued GM over the use of an image of Einstein in an advertisement. However, they ultimately lost. As reported by CDAS: United States District Judge A. Howard Matz rejected Hebrew University’s claim that New Jersey common law provides for an indefinite duration of the postmortem right of publicity, or that it alternatively is coextensive with copyright law and lasts for a minimum of 70 years after a person’s death. Instead, the Court ruled that New Jersey common law postmortem publicity rights endure for no more than 50 years after a person’s death. Because Einstein died in 1955, the Court’s ruling means that Einstein’s publicity rights are now in the public domain. ... Judge Matz concluded that the New Jersey Supreme Court would likely limit the postmortem right of publicity under New Jersey common law to endure no more than 50 years after a person’s death. He noted that the New Jersey Legislature has twice declined to enact a statutory postmortem right of publicity, and given the sparse New Jersey case law on the issue, “it is likely that the New Jersey Supreme Court would perceive pitfalls in allowing an unlimited or lengthy term to the right of publicity.” Comparing the right of publicity to New Jersey’s common law right of privacy, the Court recognized that 50 years was a “reasonable middle ground” to allow a deceased celebrity’s heir to benefit from the right of publicity, while still respecting the “public’s interest in free expression.” Mercury News reported on the same case, saying: But the judge said descendants’ right to control someone’s image after his death must be balanced with the public’s right of expression. He also ruled any right Hebrew University had to sue expired in 2005 — 50 years after Einstein’s death — because that was the limit on copyright law in 1982, when Hebrew University acquired Einstein’s right of publicity.