Can I use chess diagrams in my book without infringing any copyrights/having to pay any royalties? I am thinking about writing a book that has chess diagrams in it. For the fonts I am using the &quot;Chess Merida&quot; font, which is the &quot;default&quot; chess font used in almost all chess books. I want to make sure I'm not infringing on any copyright by doing so, and I have no experience in copyright laws so I'm asking here. Basically there will be multiple chess diagrams in the book, an example is given below. There is really no simpler way of drawing a chess diagram. On the other hand, I have seen several websites using this format, but then prohibiting commercial use of the diagrams. For instance, this chess diagram editor allows one to edit the exact same kind of diagrams as my example, yet the website says &quot;... is free for non-commercial amateur use only.&quot; So that made me wonder about copyright laws relating to chess diagrams. Obviously, I don't want to get into trouble by publishing copyrighted diagram types. Moreover, I'm not sure whether there are any royalties to pay to someone (who?) for the use of the Merida chess font. So can I use such diagrams in my book without getting into trouble? EDIT: if it is not free for commercial use, does this mean that all chess book authors pay royalties to chess font editors?
The Merida Font As noted by Tardigrade, the Merida chess font is available from https://github.com/vasiliyaltunin/chess-merida-font. However this is a derived work which incorporates a much older file containing the actual glyphs in TTF format. Edit: If you google for &quot;Armando Hernandez Marroquin&quot; you will find a lot of font download sites offering several chess fonts by Marroquin. I've sampled a couple of the README files from these fonts, both of which contained the same freeware statement quoted below. The source/README_D.TXT file referenced from the front page seems to be by the original lead author Marroquin speaking on behalf of the other authors, and says: The font is freeware, I hope it is useful for the chess buddies. If you want to repay us, you can send us some other fonts for creating chess diagrams (we are collecting them). As far as I can see the TTF font file by Marroquin et al has been incorporated directly into this repository, so if you were to use that alone then the original &quot;freeware&quot; grant would apply. The Mozilla Public License only restricts the other works in the repository (contrary to what the repository README claims). TTF is a compiled form of the font, so that would explain the use of the term &quot;freeware&quot;: this is not open source. It is true that &quot;freeware&quot; is not a formal license. The usual definition is &quot;software made available free of charge&quot;. The following note about &quot;If you want to repay us&quot; would also seem to indicate an intent to make it available to all without requiring a fee. The Marroquin README also says The figures of this font follow the more traditional style of the figures found in many publications with chess diagrams. I took them from a book with more than 5,000 chess problems. This means that Marroquin et al probably cannot claim any IPR in the visual appearance of the font glyphs. It is possible that some expressive content might be found in the exact proportions of the various glyphs, but to the extent that they merely copied traditional figures into a computer there was no creativity and hence no copyright. However Marroquin et al could claim copyright in the resulting TTF file, and any other format derived from it which describes the font in terms of vector shapes. The appearance of a piece does not dictate any single representation in geometric form in a font glyph, so the decisions made by Marroquin et al were creative. The only exception would be if the diagrams were represented using bitmaps, as that would merely be a representation of the appearance and not include Marroquin's creative work. This matters because it affects electronic and paper publication differently: If your book is published in paper form then Marroquin et al cannot claim copyright to the visual appearance shown on the page. If your book is published electronically in a form that embeds the TTF file or some similar format derived from it then Marroquin's copyright would apply to that file. If your e-book only contains bitmap versions of the chess piece glyphs then you are in the clear for the same reason as the paper version. Whether a publisher's legal department would consider this sufficient is another matter. Chess Diagram Editors The Apronos.com website you reference says that it is free for non-commercial amateur use only. However this is a restriction on the use of the website itself; if you use it to create diagrams which you subsequently publish then the website owner has no rights to your work, only to compensation for violating his terms of service (such as they are), and to an injunction stopping you from doing it again. If the website offered a commercial paid service then they could claim the damage as being the amount you avoided paying. Without such an alternative they could only claim the amount that you cost them by using the service, which is going to be trivial. If you want to be absolutely safe you can always email the website owner and ask if you can have permission in return for a contribution to running costs.
No, John may not lawfully publish such a book in such a way What John wants to do is not lawful. It would infringe on the copyright on both the 1940 original, and on the 1955 translation. Both of those are still in copyright under the laws of France, the UK, and the US. Someone owns those copyrights: some person or business or other entity. If the owner has no legal heirs, in most jurisdictions the property escheats to the government (in the US to the state government). In the case of a company, its assets will be sold or handed over to some entity. But they will not become ownerless, any more than real estate will become ownerless when the owner dies or the owning company is dissolved. It is possible that the owner does not realize that s/he owns these rights. But if John publishes his book, then owner might then realize the rights that s/he holds. The owner could demand payment, or sue for damages. Under US law the damages could include any economic loss that the owner has incurred plus any profits that John or his publisher have made. John and his publisher would both be liable for these damages. As a result, no publisher is likely to be willing to publish John's book. If John self-publishers, he incurs the risk of such demands and suit. In some countries (such as the UK) there are legal procedures fore dealing with such &quot;orphan works&quot;. In those countries one can register with a government agency, and obtain permission to use the work after a search has revealed no owner, paying a rate set by law. But there is no such provision in the US. There, John must either not publish, or gamble that no owner will appear and make demands he cannot afford to meet.
In general this kind of brief literary reference is not unlawful, and such things occur in both novels and commercial games with some frequency. Making such a reference a major part of the plot, such as by using a name from a previous work as a major character, particularly if other aspects of that character are also used, is far more likely to cause a problem. In the united-states this would be a matter of fair use. In general, when only a very small part of the source work is used, such a a single name; where the use is &quot;transformative&quot;, that is used for a rather different purpose than in the source work; where the use does not harm the market for the original work; and where the use does not serve as a replacement for the original, it is likely to be held to be fair use. But fair use decisions are always fact-dependent, and are made case-by-case, so it is hard to be absolutely sure of one in advance. But the kind of literary reference described in the question is very unlikely to be held to be copyright infringement.
They have copyright in their additional text, and possibly in things like their visual design choices (fonts, layout etc). They may also have introduced a few deliberate typos to detect any literal copies from their version (rather as mapmakers add a few imaginary features to their maps). None of this creates any rights to the original text. You are still free to produce your own copies of the original text. Just get it from some other source so you can be sure not to include anything of theirs.
Both the displayed site (including all text and images) and the html, css, javascript and other code that generates the display are protected by copyright. This is true in pretty much every country. You would not be able to reuse them lawfully without permission, unless an exception to copyright applies. If no exception applies, and you have not obtained permission, this is copyright infringement. In most cases copyright infringement is treated as a tort (a civil matter), not as a crime. This means that law enforcement generally will take no action and have no interest in such a situation. The copyright owner could sue for infringement, and possibly collect money damages. In the US, statutory damages can be as high as $30,000, or up to $150,000 for &quot;wilful&quot; infringement, or as low as $750 (per work infringed). Or actual damages can be collected instead. In other countries, actual damages plus costs of suit are more likely, but the rule can be different in each country. The possible exceptions to copyright vary significantly in different countries. In the US the major exception is Fair use. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? and I have a question about copyright. What should I read before I ask it? for more information In general short snippets of code can probably be used under fair use, but substantial parts of the code or the displayed site are less likely to qualify as fair use. And if it is illegal then why are there so many legal open source or paid software and applications for cloning of website like httrack, cyotek, webcopy etc? Most of these tools have legitimate uses, including learning how a site is constructed without distributing copied content; and cloning or partial cloning of a site with permission. Even if the tools were mostly used for unlawful copying, that might well not be a high priority for law enforcement, and cross-border law enforcement (which this in many cases would involve) is often much harder for the police and other authorities.
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.
Yes, if the book was published in 1913, the copyright has expired. You can freely scan it in and publish it. But note you have NO copyright to the material. You didn't write it. Copyright law gives rights to the AUTHOR of a work. It doesn't matter how much effort you went to scanning it in and formatting it. Nothing in copyright law says that that gives you any rights. If you add anything creative of your own, you would own the copyright to the new material. Like if you drew new illustrations and added them to the book. Or if you included your own commentary. Or you added explanatory footnotes. That still wouldn't give you rights to the original text, but you would own the new material. But in the same vein, if the book was originally published in 1913, but the copy you have includes material added by a later editor, that later material might still be protected by copyright. Just a side thought, it occurs to me that if I was going to republish a public domain book, a good idea would be to add footnotes. If my footnotes appear on almost every page, then no one else could just take my electronic files and sell them himself. He'd have to go through page by page and purge out all the footnotes. Make it hard for someone to "borrow" your work and you might scare them off.
Regardless of the license associated with a document, there is no copyright protection on information. Copyright protection prevents copying "expression", e.g. the wording, but not the facts / opinions expressed through those words. The non-legal academic concept of "plagiarism" is where the notion of attribution primarily comes into play. There is a special exception under 17 USC 106A that imposes an attribution requirement for works of visual art. CC and other license schemes may add in an attribution requirement for actual copying of the expression (the "BY" attribute in CC). If a work is licensed under CC-BY, you may copy the actual expression provided that you follow the terms of the license, which primarily means that you have to attribute the work in the prescribed manner. This does not apply to extracting information from a work, because information is not protected by copyright.