Attributing the Assistance of an Online Translator for a Book&#39;s Chapter---Is It Necessary? I have recently finished a work in which one of the chapters is based upon a translation of a nineteenth century document in which I have made use of a free online translator. Where the translator seemed to be at fault, I have done the translation myself; though in the end, the major portion of the whole translation used in that chapter relies on the output of the online translator. The book, in three volumes, contains sixty chapters, only one of which, includes output from the the aforementioned translator. QUESTION: Am I obligated to acknowledge the use of this free online tool; and if so, how should that be done? Can the writer of the software legally demand some sort of royalties when the book is published? I anticipate that it will be published in the United States. UPDATE A follow-up to this question is found here: Copyright Ownership of a Translated Article Appearing in a Book in Which an Online Translator was Used
Using software generally does not entail any legal requirement to acknowledge the use of that software, and would only arise as a licensing condition. Google services, including Translate, are subject to certain terms of use especial the part about what they expect of you. They do not impose any requirement regarding acknowledgment, therefore they cannot later demand any royalties. If a translation program imposes any demands on your usage of the program, that has to be part of the original agreement whereby you were allowed to use the software at all.
Links are in French. As the author of a work, you would generally hold copyright unless there's a contract otherwise. L113 of the Code de la propriété intellectuelle determines who is the rights holder of a given work and I don't see anything there that changes things for you as a contractor. Even if you assigned some rights to your employer through a contract, France has moral rights which can never be ceded. In fact, even if you were a salaried employee, you still hold the rights by default, unlike the US. There are a few exceptions to that though: software, inseparable joint works, and works where the creative process was purely directed by your superiors.
As @amon stated in a comment, copyright requires creativity. If the author of a tool wants to claim copyright on the output of that tool, then that output must contain something that required the creativity of the tool author. For a tool that just re-indents its input, the output is created from the input with a mechanical, non-creative, transformation and the output does not contain any creative content that wasn't already present in the input. For that reason, authors of such tools can't claim any copyright on the output. For a tool like bison, which was mentioned in the comments, the output contains a measurable amount of creative content that was not present in the input, but which was provided by the authors of bison. For that reason, the authors of 'bison' do have a copyright claim on the output of the tool (for which they give a broad permission to use). So, the basic question becomes, how much of the (creative) content of the output can be traced back to the tool itself and not to the input that the tool processed. For linters/formatters, that is likely to be very little. For code generators, it can be anywhere between very little and all of the output. The license restrictions on the code produced by the tool itself are by default the same as the license restrictions on the source of the tool, but the tool author can choose to apply any other license to the tool code that ends up in the output. If the output of the tool is, at least in part, dependent on an input file, then the authors of the input file also have a copyright claim on the tool output (as their creative work influenced the output), so the tool author can not claim exclusive ownership. The usual situation is that for tools that don't add creative content to the output, the author explicitly states that the don't have any copyright claims on the output. For tools that do add creative content, that content might be released under very permissive conditions (like, "you can use the output as a whole for any purpose, but you can only separate out the code that comes from the tool's codebase if you adhere to the &lt;X> license")
Primary Theory I suspect there might not be a legal answer to this question. I have always suspected a sort of pseudo-intellectual elitism (or simple preference or carelessness) with passive voice sentence construction in general. I sense license writers have not (yet) escaped this general trend. I would love someone to prove this theory incorrect. But, alas, I doubt it will happen. Alternative Theory But because this is a Law Q&amp;A site, I will advance the following alternative theory. I don't believe it's correct. But I will advance it because it's the only possible explanation I can think of that might be even remotely based on legal reasoning... Maybe they are just basing their construction on the way the law itself is written? For example, if the law says, "Permission must be granted..." Then it would follow that a writer who wants to comply with the law might choose, "Permission is hereby granted..." instead of something like "The authors hereby grant permission..." or, as the OP suggested, "You may..."
Unless the work has entered the public domain (after the copyright expires, or if a copyright notice or renewal was omitted when these were required, or in other ways) there is always an owner of the copyright. If the copyright was retained by the author, who has died, than the author's heir(s) own it. (If there are no other heirs, it becomes the property of the state. This is known as escheating.) If the author has sold or assigned the copyright (say to a publisher) then the buyer or assignee owns it. If the owner is a business that has ceased to operate, but has not sold the copyright, then the shareholders or proprietor has the right to sell or license it (technically the business still owns it). If the business goes through legal bankruptcy, the copyright would be sold, possibly as a part of "and all its other assets and good will", or else would escheat to the state. It can be hard to find the copyright to a work long unpublished. The original author may have died, and the author's heirs may be hard to track. The copyright may have been sold, and the sale may not have been properly recorded. In the US, the Copyright Office maintains records that try to identify the copyright owner of all registered copyrights. The office will search these, for a fee, but there is not always a correct or useful answer. Under current US law, if one cannot find the correct owner of a copyright, and secure permission to use it, one is simply out of luck (except for musing, where a compulsory license is available for some uses at a government-specified fee). Any use is then infringement (unless it is a fair use) and the owner could always turn up and sue. The term "orphan works" has been applied to works whose copyright owner is unknown and hard to find. The same term is also applied to works whose copyright holder is known, but which are long out of print and unlikely to be reprinted, particularly when there is no paying market for them. In the US, there have been several proposals for dealing with "orphan works" by granting a compulsory licensee for them, or by declaring them to be in the public domain, or by taxing them and declaring them to be PD if he tax goes unpaid. None of these have been passed into law in the US, nor have similar proposals been made law in any other country that I know of. (declaring Orphan works PD might cause a problem under the Berne Convention.) To be honest, as there is little economic value in orphan works, no one will spend much money or energy in lobbying for such a law, and the industries that make their money via copyright (music and film in particular) are often suspicious of and automatically oppose anything that weakens copyright in any way, or seems to. In any case, no such law has yet passed. (Edit I now learn that Canada and the EU have laws giving access to orphan works under some circumstances, and other countries may have such laws.) It is true that the owner of the copyright on an orphan work may well be unlikely to sue for infringement of that copyright. The owner may not even know that s/he owns the copyright. But a user could never by fully safe, because the owner (or a new owner after a transfer) could always choose to sue for any continuing infringement, and any past one if the statute of limitations has not run out. This answer is largely based on knowledge of US law, but I believe that this situation is basically the same in most countries.
On what grounds would you sue? Contract Well, I think that you would struggle to find the necessary elements (see What is a contract and what is required for them to be valid?) In particular, you would struggle to prove that there was intention to create legal relations on their part and possibly on yours. Are you able to identify in your "back &amp; forth" a clear, unequivocal offer and acceptance? Without knowing the details of the "back &amp; forth": I was hoping that someone at $organization might be willing to write an article explaining what you do, the history of the organization and how it works appears on the face of it to be a request for a gift; not an offer to treat. Promissory Estoppel If you don't have a contract then it is possible (IMO unlikely) that they induced you by your actions to commit resources (your time in writing) in anticipation of a reward (them publishing what you wrote). To be estopped they would have to have known that you were writing the article in the expectation that it would have your organisation's name in it, that they did not intend for that to happen and that they allowed you to invest those resources notwithstanding. If you can prove all of that then you can require them to do what they promised. The big difficulty I see in this is did you tell them that a) you were writing the article, b) it would have your name in it and c) you expected it to be published in that form. Copyright If they publish the work or a derivative work without your permission you can sue for breach of copyright. As it stands, they probably have an implied licence to publish and you would need to explicitly revoke that. Options There are two reasons to go to court: Money Principle If you are going to court for money then this is at best a risky investment and at worst a gamble: balance your risk and reward carefully. If you are going to court for a principle then I simultaneously admire your principles and think you're an idiot. Make a deal Explain that the reason that you wrote the article was a) to support their fine publication and the fantastic work it does (even if you don't) and b) to garner good publicity for your organisation. You understand and admire their strong editorial stance (especially if you don't) but the article involved a considerable amount of work and could they see their way clear to give you a significant discount (~80%) on a full page ad facing the article.
The creator of the derivative work has copyright in the derivative work. The copyright would protect only the new elements of the derivative work. Wikipedia is a good place to start. In the case of a book with updated grammar, depending on the extent of the changes, it would probably be easier to copy the original directly than to eliminate the updates from a copy of the derivative work.
That means that a person cannot put a new cover or binding on a book, and then resell it or lend it, unless permission is obtained from the publisher. This has the effect of prohibiting libraries, which need to rebind most books, from carrying the book without the publisher's permission. This condition did not apply in the US, because under the US Law's First Sale Doctrine, the seller cannot impose such conditions on the buyer. The very standardize wording was, I think, once part of the Net book Agreement (NBA) used by Penguin and other UK-based publishers on sales in the UK and the Commonwealth. You will find it on many used books from such publishers. I believe the main aim was to prohibit discount resellers of used books, and to prohibit sale of "stripped books" (reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed"). I believe that this is no longer in effect, but I am not sure. The NBA was dissolved in 1995.