Does copyright on a resume prevent you from sharing it? As I understand it a resume is automatically considered the intellectual property of its author, and the author has a right to determine how it will be copied ie. distributed. Does this actually hold any practical significance? Does this mean that when someone sends you their resume, it is unlawful to pass it on to others unless the author gives permission? Can you get sued if the resume finds its way to someone the author did not intend to see it, and the author suffers some harm as a result? Is distributing a resume in the context of professional networking considered as implicit consent to allow sharing with anyone under the US legal system?
You need permission to copy unless fair use applies Does this mean that when someone sends you their resume, it is unlawful to pass it on to others unless the author gives permission? First note that copyright law only applies to copying. If someone were to give you a physical copy of their resume (assuming such a thing would happen in this day and age) then giving this to someone else without copying it is not copyright violation. There may be privacy issues involved but that’s another issue. Further, in the United States, there is a fair use doctrine which allows limited copying without permission in certain circumstances. This is likely to apply in a lot of situations around copying resumes. Finally, permission does not have to be explicit. For example, if you receive a resume in the course of a job application then permission to make copies for that purpose can be assumed to have been implicitly given. Can you get sued if the resume finds its way to someone the author did not intend to see it, and the author suffers some harm as a result? Under privacy law, possibly. Under copyright law, no. What you can be sued for is making a copy. It doesn’t matter where this ends up. Is distributing a resume in the context of professional networking considered as implicit consent to allow sharing with anyone under the US legal system? No. It’s explicit consent because those networking sites have Terms and Conditions that explicitly deal with copyright. For example, if you post your resume on LinkedIn, you agree to this.
No. Only the company owns the copyright, not its shareholders. A company is a separate legal entity with its own capacity to own property. Copyright is property, not infection that can be spread onto whoever is close enough. Pretty much like shareholders can't just share the use of the company's tangible assets, they can't wet their beaks in the copyright. As a shareholder, what you could do is to appoint a director/CEO that will give you license to copy (or even transfer the copyright) — if you have enough shares to fire the current CEO and put yours. The CEO will get into legal trouble with other shareholders/creditors, but you'll still enjoy your right to copy.
The answer depends in part what venue you're talking about, e.g. Reddit, Facebook etc. The details are revealed somewhere in the Terms of Service for that venue. The general pattern is that you are allowed to use that venue, provides you grant permission for the service to do what they do with your content. You cannot legally send them a take-down notice for your stuff, because a take-down notice requires you to say that the stuff was posted without your permission (and that is false – and you can be punished for making that statement). There could be a venue where they do not hold you to an irrevocable license, in which case you could revoke that permission (but not Reddit: you granted them a "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so"). I've seen a site that actually asserts ownership of user-contributed content (I don't know if their TOS ended up being litigated) – if is not at all hard to write a TOS that includes transfer of copyright, rather than granting of a license. The only hard parts are (1) figuring out what you want in terms of permission to use and (2) whether your answer to (1) means nobody will use your service. SE and Reddit TOS probably are as close as you need to get for what you describe.
Ask As an employee, anything you create in the course of your employment belongs to your employer. Now, writing textbooks is probably not in the course of a schoolteacher's employment. Note that I said &quot;probably&quot; - it's possible that if you publish and it becomes wildly successful your employer might just want to go to court to check how &quot;probably&quot; actually falls out in practice. So, the simplest thing is to tell your employer that you are thinking of writing a textbook for your subject in your spare time and would they please disclaim any copyright claim they might have. If they won't, find another employer (or don't write the book).
In the US, the author would be able to wind an infringement lawsuit against the re-publisher. Title 17, the US copyright law codified, grants the author the exclusive right to authorize republication, and does not require that a person use their real name. The argument "It was on the internet, it's in the public domain" is utterly without legal merit. The same goes for the assertion that a person loses his rights if he is uncontactable. The author has stated the terms of the license, so there isn't even a reasonable argument that the infringement is innocent (unknowing: "I thought it was with permission). There is no requirement that you have to allow a potential user to hassle you about the license terms. The one thing that is special regarding anonymous and pseudonymous works is that under 17 USC 302, "copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first". For a work whose author is identified, copyright "endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death". This assumes that the host site has not preempted author's license: Stack Exchange, for example, preempts an author's exclusive right, so you can copy stuff from here accorting to the SE terms of usage.
Copyright protection exists for any work (picture, paragraph, song etc), and persists for many years until it expires. Unless the work was created a long time ago, or was created by the US government (not the same as &quot;funded by government money&quot;), you should assume that the work is protected. That means that you must have permission to copy it. Sometimes, a work has associated with it some such permission, in the form of a &quot;license&quot;. Without such a license, you have to request the copyright owner for permission to copy – whether or not they say that the work is protected by copyright (because by law it is protected, so they don't have to say that it is). If you request permission to copy, and do not receive the required permission, then you cannot legally copy the work. The copyright holder has no obligation to explicitly deny permission. You can certainly list the URL for an image, you just cannot copy the image in your book.
The Apache 2.0 license purports to be irrevocable, but it also presupposes that the supposed licensor has the right to grant permission to copy. In this case, that is untrue, so there never was a proper license and nothing to revoke (the copyright owner grants permission in the form of "a license" which is a legal abstraction, that normally is specified in the license document). An end-user snared by this illegal license might attempt to sue the author because of the legal screw-up but paragraph 9 says that the supposed licensor cannot be held liable. In this case, though, "licensor" is defined not as the person who hands you the license document, but as the copyright owner. So it's the employer who would be not liable under the terms of the document (but since the employer had nothing to do with the license, it's as though the license never existed). The end-user is a secondary infringer (the employee is the primary infringer, in illegally distributing the material). Under US law, that doesn't matter, the user is still liable. Under UK law, secondary infringement includes the element that you have to have reason to know that the copy is infringing, which in the scenario that you describe is not the case.
Yes, except for the part where you say &quot;thus&quot;. Copyright protection isn't limited to published works, though in the past this was the case with US law. Current US law defines publication as the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes publication. A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication. Web distribution is one way to distribute a protected work. The distinction between published and unpublished works matters in terms of registration requirements, it figures into the question of the nationality of the author, the duration of protection for a work for hire and (pseudo)anonymous works, as well as the duration of protection for works created before January 1, 1978 but first published between then and January 1, 2003, and so on. The US Copyright office provides guidance that derives from court cases, and they have this to say about published vs. unpublished. They give as an example of publication (&quot;Offering to Distribute Copies or Phonorecords to a Group of Persons&quot;) Publication occurs when copies of a photograph are offered to clients, including but not limited to newspapers, magazines, agencies, wire services, and websites with a license permitting further distribution or display of the photograph. also An offer by the copyright owner on a public website to purchase and download an app that they developed and made accessible on that website constitutes publication of that app. German copyright law makes mention of &quot;publication&quot; as well, for instance The right of publication and of exploitation of the work accrues jointly to the joint authors; alterations to the work shall be permissible only with the consent of the joint authors. However, a joint author may not refuse his consent to publication, exploitation or alteration contrary to the principles of good faith. Each joint author shall be entitled to assert claims arising from violations of the joint copyright; he may, however, demand performance only to all of the joint authors. §6 says that (1) A work shall be deemed to have been published when it has been made available to the public with the consent of the rightholder. (2) A work shall be deemed to have been released when copies of the work have been offered, with the rightholder’s consent, to the public or brought to the market after their production in sufficient quantity. An artistic work shall also be deemed to have been released when the original or a copy of the work has been made permanently available to the public with the consent of the rightholder. One would have to inquire into the specifics of German law to know if &quot;putting one copy on a website&quot; constitutes being brought to the market after production in sufficient quantity.