Is monetizing a piano video playing others&#39; sheets illegal? Say, I bought a piano sheet from a youtuber in websites like mymusicsheet. I made some rearrangement to it or not, (does this make any change?) then I uploaded a video playing it in youtube and monetized it. Is this illegal?
Publicly performing a work is one of the rights protected by copyright. Doing so, particularly for money, without authorization would be copyright infringement. It is possible to obtain authorization via a mechanical license. This is a license created by statute. In US law this is covered by 17 USC 115. That section provides that when a musical work has already been recorded and placed on sale or offered to the public, another person may send a notice of intention to make and distribute recordings to the copyright owner, or the copyright office if the owner is not known. The person must pay a royalty established by the law, and comply with various other conditions. Or permission may be obtained from the copyright owner or the owner's agent, often for a fee. In the absence of such authorization or permission, making and distributing recordings of performances of the musical work is infringement, and the copyright owner may sue and collect damages. The site, MyMusicSheet, includes a TOS document that implies that rights are granted to the user when music is purchased. But this document is not at all clear on just what rights are purchased with the sheet music. In particular, it does not say if the purchase includes a license to perform the music, and if so, if it includes doing so commercially. Perhaps after one signs up with the service, more detailed information is provided. If the purchase includes a license to perform the work commercially, and to distribute recordings of such performances, all would be well. If not, doing so might well be copyright infringement unless the user goes through the steps to obtain a mechanical license, or gets permission from the copyright owner directly.
Any use of the song snippets in your App can be copyright infringement (in the US), Fair Use (U.S. Copyright Office) not withstanding. Not distributing the App and/or using the App only in a limited group for the study, or not making money from the App doesn't usually matter when it comes to copyright infringement. Fair Use does have some educational exceptions; read the link above and see if your case may fit. But the final assessment of educational use would be made by a court if you were sued for infringement. If the use in your App doesn't fall under the education exception, you still probably run little risk of the copyright holders finding out if the App use is private and within a small group, but that's your choice to make. You can always Google the name of the music/recording company; most provide ways online to request licensing of samples, but the cost may be prohibitive, or permission may simply not be available for popular songs.
First of all, taking a video made by someone else, making alterations and then distributing the resulting work is probably already a copyright violation. There are exemptions like fair use (check the comments for an example), but just taking a whole video, mirroring it and reposting it without any own contribution very likely does not constitute fair use. The people who do that don't avoid copyright infingement. They just try to avoid getting caught by any automatic system YouTube has in place to detect copyright infringements. But avoiding automatic filters does not mean to avoid DMCA takedown notices, cease&amp;desist letters or lawsuits from real humans who find a mirrored version of their video and feel that their copyright was violated. However, alterations to a creative work can be a creative work in itself. So regardless of the fact that one violated copyright in creating a derivative work, that derivative work might still be eligible for copyright in its own right. That means someone who reposts a video originally made by party A and then altered by party B would violate the copyright of both A and B at once and thus expose themselves to potential legal actions from either party. But the question is if simply mirroring a video constitutes the necessary threshold of originality to make the resulting work eligible for copyright. In most courts, it probably would not.
Copyright Law: Probably Not so long as you are not hosting anything other than a link. (This is a secondary source) Even if academics and technology enthusiasts prefer an absolute right to link on the Internet, the business world has an interest in regulating what information is shared.66 Businesses will protest free linking to their materials if it interferes with their sales or marketing messages.67 If a website operator *1090 desires to restrict certain content from being linked to or integrated in another site, the operator can require a password to view the site or can technically disable outside sites from in-line linking to images or media hosted by the site.68 Youtube ToS: You may have an issue with ToS 4. D. if you have ads on your webpage. Service here is defined as "by using or visiting the YouTube website or any YouTube products, software, data feeds, and services provided to you on, from, or through the YouTube website " But it does seem to allow you to use an embedded player in your site if you wanted. ToS 4. F.
No It says right on the page you linked: These downloads are not public domain, as they are parts of content that has already been licensed and distributed. Although using these downloads may be permissible as long as the project itself falls under the rule of "Fair Use," it is ill-advised to use these downloads for any project intended for profitable gain or commercial advertisement, unless otherwise stated by Kyutwo.com.
You need to make sure you are not infringing upon the copyrights of the music owners. There might be other things you need to do. But at a minimum you will need to have agreements with the music owners that specify the timing and amount of the payments they will receive for allowing you to distribute their music. And any other ancillary terms you or they might want to include depending on the details of your business model.
Copyright protection is about certain acts, and not about relationships between products. Copyright law says that the creator of an original work hold the exclusive right to copy and to authorize creation of derivative works. Copyright law does not say that anybody can freely create derivative works as long as they are different to a certain extent. So if you take an original Mario and modify it a teeny bit, that is a violation of copyright; if you take an original Mario and modify it hugely, that is a violation of copyright. Degree of similarity is relevant on some cases when the factual question arises whether the allegedly-infringing work is based on some protected original. This is most obvious in music cases, where all baroque music has some similarity to all other baroque music, all death metal has some similarity to all other death metal, and so on. There is not a legal quasi-statutory standard for measuring substantial similarity in music. The scientific underpinning of such a standard would be based on (weighted) combinatorics and the idea that there are only so many tunes possible (that would be a huge number, until you get to the "within a genre" condition). It seems obvious (by your "admission") that the derived works are based on protected works, so Nintendo's permission is required to legally create such works. However, you do or would hold copyright in your unauthorized derived work. Without a trail of evidence such as a SE question pointing to the connection, the derived images might be hard to connect to the originals. In addition, you may be able to avail yourself of a "fair use" defense, in case you get sued by the original creator. Factors favoring such a defense are the insubstantiality of the copying (a small portion) and the "transformativeness" of your creation.
No. You may not do this. As your post points out this is a blatant copyright violation. It isn't remotely in the realm of fair use.