Is it legal include an image from Wikipedia into a lead-generating e-book? I'm writing an e-book, which is supposed to generate leads in the following way: People visit my landing page. There, they see a text like "Enter your e-mail address and get this e-book for free". Those, who entered and confirmed their membership, receive the e-book. As long as they haven't unsubscribed, they also receive several e-mails in the following weeks with information related to the e-book and the product I'll sell to them. The purpose of those e-mails is to make the subscriber to contact me and tell me what he or she liked/disliked about my offering (sort of market research). Based on the responses from the list members, I create and sell products. Even though the e-book is free, it's a for-profit thing. In that e-book I have this passage: There used to be a Russian management guru, Georgii Petrovich Shchedrovitski, who argued that there are two fundamentally different kinds of knowledge work: 1) Science, which looks for sameness. 2) Activity, which looks for differences. Thereafter follows a detailed explanation of his theory. Is it legal (under US laws) to include a picture of G. P. Shchedrovitski from Wikipedia in this e-book?
Wikipedia has two kinds of pictures: Reusable pictures, most of them stored at http://commons.wikimedia.org Copyrighted pictures under fair-use, stored on the local Wikipedia (in your case, the Russian Wikipedia) but not on Commons. To know what case it is, just click on the Wikipedia picture, click on the blue "Description" button, and see whether it redirects you to Commons or not. Pictures on Commons are reusable if you include the author and license (see the full requirements). Commercial use is OK. Fair-use pictures can not be reused. Unfortunately, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Файл:Tschedrovitsky.jpg is in the second case, so you can not reuse it, even in a non-commercial setting, unless you can justify that your usage qualifies as fair-use in your country. Hopefully one day someone will find a legally reusable picture of Shchedrovitski and upload it to Commons.
You are framing it wrong. It is not that "they have put a barrier" to public domain information, it is that they have added an additional source of that information. The new source has a barrier, yes, but that does not prevent you from accessing the same information elsewhere. If you own a copy of some public domain data, you are not allowed to prevent other users from accessing other copies (by claiming copyright infringement or the like); you cannot even prevent people from doing copies from the copies you did provide them. But you are not forced to allow other users to access your copy. Consider the logical conclusion if that were the law. The moment that you downloaded some public domain file into your computer, you would be forced to give access to your hard disk from the internet, isn't it? Would you need to leave your home door open if you happened to have a printed copy of the text there? Of course, there is a need to discriminate between "public domain" (without licence) and "not public domain but open licence" (BSD, CC, GPL, etc.). In the later case the licence could be tailored so that the work could appear in archive.org but that it would be illegal to provide it with the business model of Academia.edu1. But that would be possible only for works not in the public domain. 1 To be decided by a judge on the basis of the wording of the licence and jurisdiction.
It is legsl to include references showing readers where facts you include in your article were derived, or where they can be supported. Indeed academic ethics generally require doing so, although there is (in most cases) no legal requirement to do so. Listing the title, author, and publication information of a source is not an infringement of copyright. That J. Jones published an article on &quot;How to Find the Purple Moth&quot; [imaginary example] in volume 28 of the Journal of Moth Science is a fact.Facts are never protected by copyright. Indeed in US law 17 USC 102(b) provides that: b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. The laws of other countries are similar on this point. Indeed I do not know of any country in which facts are protected by copyright. So, including such references is fully legal, and no permission from the sources being cited is required. This is true whatever form the reference takes. In particular, if an online address for the content is included, this is still true. I do not know whether Medium, or any other specific publishing platform, will pat fees to authors based on clik-thru from such citations. That depends on their particular policies, which might be found in their Terms of Service or other policy document.
Bob is not authorized, but he may legally do so (in the US, you don't need specific authorization to perform a non-forbidden act). In creating the manual, Bob would need to avoid reproducing the questions (which are protected by copyright), and just give the answers. Copyright protection for the textbook includes not just the actual words, but also organizational structure, so Bob would need to avoid copying the structure of the exercises. As for "structure of the exercises", textbooks often have exercises for each chapter, with a clear logic to the order and content of chapters. Within the chapter exercises, there is often some rationale to the order of presentation of the dozen exercises, like starting for with simplest concepts presented in the text and moving up the ladder. In a given exercise, there my be subparts, where understanding part 1 leads you to understanding part 2, and so on. In a well-structure textbook, maybe 20% of the creative nature of the book is that artful ordering. Imposing an entirely different order on your solutions avoids copying the author's protected expression.
By posting an image (or any other content) on an openly accessible page, a person such as Alice is implicitly giving permission to anyone to view or read that content, although not necessarily to make copies of it. A link from a page operated by Bob to such content is not making a copy, nor is it any other form of infringement. However, there are other possible cases. For example, if Alice sells access to her pictures, placing them behind a paywall, so that only those who have paid have a valid ID/PW set to gain access, then if Bob provides a link that bypasses the paywall, that may well be contributory infringement (CI). When Bob builds a business model on encouraging or facilitating infringement, that will be CI. If Alice does not post her pictures, but Charlie gets copies and posts them without permission, a link from Bob's site to Charlie's may be CI, particularly if Bob gets per-click revenue or other benefits for increased traffic.
Technically speaking, such emails are copyrighted by the sender. However, showing such an email to a third party, or posting it publicly in order to comment on it would almost surely be a fair use in the US. In any case, such an email would have no commercial value, and so there would be no financial damages possible. A lawsuit over such a technical copyright infringement would, in my view, be quite unlikely, and even less likely to be successful. Indeed, filing such a suit would be one of the best ways for the business to draw attention to the issue, in an example of the Streisand Effect.
The audio book would probably be an infringing derivative work because the client could redistribute it once the client received it. It sounds very much like a product that is regularly sold by merchants relying on copyrights. Conceivably, simply reading a book aloud to a client in some sort of streaming context that could't be shared with others or replayed would merely be fair use, much like hiring a baby sitter to read a book aloud to your children would be clearly fair use. If there were an automatic text to sound converter as opposed to an individualized performance, it might not be considered infringing. There are people with programs that do this who haven't been sued, but the boundaries haven't been explored very thoroughly. Honestly, there isn't a lot of guidance in this area from statutory language, and the questions would often not be guided by much case law involving similar facts. Your intuition living in the modern world is probably almost as good as a lawyer's in this situation.
The U.S. FTC gave extensive guidance on this subject in March 2013. (You may have noticed shortly thereafter that conspicuous disclosures of free samples and compensation started popping up in reviews and posts around the web.) The FTC's FAQ covers this question in such detail I would just encourage people to visit it directly. However, as is the custom on Stack Exchange, I will reproduce the most salient content here: If an endorser is acting on behalf of an advertiser, what she or he is saying is usually going to be commercial speech – and commercial speech violates the FTC Act if it’s deceptive. The FTC (ironically?) refers to 16 CFR §255 as "the Guides." The Guides, at their core, reflect the basic truth-in-advertising principle that endorsements must be honest and not misleading. An endorsement must reflect the honest opinion of the endorser and can’t be used to make a claim that the product’s marketer couldn’t legally make. In addition, the Guides say if there’s a connection between an endorser and the marketer that consumers would not expect and it would affect how consumers evaluate the endorsement, that connection should be disclosed. For example, if an ad features an endorser who’s a relative or employee of the marketer, the ad is misleading unless the connection is made clear. The same is usually true if the endorser has been paid or given something of value to tout the product. The reason is obvious: Knowing about the connection is important information for anyone evaluating the endorsement.