Is it legal to redistribute a digital copy of a library book? My library provides two ways to get a digital copy of a book: If the book is already digitized, then for a reasonable fee they allow to download it in PDF. For another very reasonable fee, they allow to use my own camera and make photos of the book. There is an old book (copyright is already expired), which I would like to share over the internet. Is it legal to just get PDF from them and share it, or should I create my own copy with a camera, or only the library has the right to distribute these copies? Update: I am located in Belarus. However, I would like to understand the international practice for this.
You don't say where you are located. Copyright laws are different in different countries, am going to assume US laws. Under US law, a faithful digitization of a book does not get a new copyeight, see Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 25 F. Supp. 2d 421 (S.D.N.Y. 1998) and thw Wikipedia article about that case (On the issue of mrequired originality, see also FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC. v. RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE COMPANY, INC. (No. 89-1909.) (1991) which dealt with copying a telephone directory.) The court in Bridgeman held that: It is uncontested that Bridgeman's images are substantially exact reproductions of public domain works, albeit in a different medium. The images were copied from the underlying works without any avoidable addition, alteration or transformation. Indeed, Bridgeman strives to reproduce precisely those works of art. ... The mere reproduction of a work of art in a different medium should not constitute the required originality for the reason that no one can claim to have independently evolved any particular medium.'&quot; As discussed above, the law requires &quot;some element of material alteration or embellishment&quot; to the totality of the work. At bottom, the totality of the work is the image itself, and Bridgeman admittedly seeks to duplicate exactly the images of the underlying works. ... [O]ne need not deny the creativity inherent in the art of photography to recognize that a photograph which is no more than a copy of the work of another as exact as science and technology permit lacks originality. That is not to say such a feat is trivial, simply not original. The more persuasive analogy is that of a photocopier. Surely designing the technology to produce exact reproductions of documents required much engineering talent, but that does not make the reproductions copyrightable. The Bridgeman court was actually construing UK law, but the earthlier phase of Bridgeman i and the SCOTUS case of Feist show the same result under UIS law. Note that books and other works published before 1925 are now out of copyright in the US. Copyright can also be lost ion other ways, such as publishing without a copyright notice before the effective date of the 1976 act, and failure to properly renew a work published in the US before 1964. Assuming that the book is not under copyright, neither the library nor anyone else has a US copyright in the PFD. Unless the library imposes some additional restriction by contract, any such PDF may be copied or shared freely. It may even be sold or rented. And the validity of such an additional agreement would be questionable, but since the question does not mention such an agreement, I will not go into that further.
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.
I presume the input is text: "my original text" is assumed to mean you wrote (created) the text. That means that you hold the copyright to the text, and only you can authorize a derivative work (such as a synthesized recording). Therefore, you hold the copyright to the recordings as well. The crucial consideration governing that right is that you "created" the work, meaning that there is a modicum of creativity. However, if you did not create the text and your only function is to host an automatic process where users can create a synthesized recording, then whoever created the text has the right to the text and derivative works (i.e. the synthesized output). Automated processes like (unassisted) OCR or wav-to-mp3 conversion would not count as being "original", nor would automatic text-to-speech, so you don't gain copyright just from making an automatic work-creating tool available. On the assumption that the conversion involves a component of Chrome, you can use the service per the terms of service, though you cannot "reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services". This might limit the extent to which you could make this conversion available to others, depending on how, exactly, you could do such a thing (does it duplicate the service?). As they say, Google owns all legal right to the Services, but Google obtains no right from you for any content created through their service. There is no restriction in the TOS against using the service for commercial purposes. Even if there were, that would not assign copyright in the recording to anyone else, it would just mean they could sue you for violating the TOS.
Data, as it happens in law, can also be owned. That's why we have a discipline called "Intellectual Property". It is a "thing" - like other properties like cars, houses etc., someone owns it. Now, does the transfer of a computer also includes a transfer of data ownership stored inside the computer? Practically speaking, this clause is very unlikely to be included in the agreement when a computer is sold. It didn't explicitly say "yes" (you may use anything you find in the hard drive), but it didn't explicitly say "no" either, hence the question. Looking at data, we can list a few legal concepts related to them: Data collection Data storage Data usage Copyright The exact details vary by jurisdiction, but in general: Data must be collected through legal means Data must be stored in a secure manner to protect the data subjects Data must only be used by purposes agreed during data collection by the data subjects Copyright is not transferrable without signatures "License to use" is not transferrable either Example 1, let's say a software is installed in the computer, with an appropriate license. This license was purchased by the original owner, therefore the software company licensed him to use the software, not you. The agreement does not have your name on it. Example 2, the original owner is a photographer and have some beautiful photos stored on the hard drive. By virtue of Copyright, he is the author and copyright owner of these photos. There has been no signed document describing the transfer of copyright ownership to you, nor license you to use these photos in any way. Example 3, the computer belongs to a company, and client information is stored on the hard drive. By transferring the computer to a third-party without wiping the drive clean, the company fails to use reasonable measures to protect the data of their clients. If somebody uses this data, then he is using data collected through illegal means, and can be prosecuted. A counter example would be someone transferring ownership of the computer for the purpose of transferring the data inside. Note this is different: it is clear to both parties that the purpose of the exchange is to obtain the data stored inside the medium. The ownership of the storage medium and the data inside are separated. Likewise any intellectual property associated to a physical object. When you go to the store and purchase a Bluray of a movie, you buy the physical ownership of the plastic disc + permission (license) to view the contents of the disc in a private setting. You do not buy the copyright of the movie even though it is in your hand. To conclude, the answer is No - transfer of ownership of a storage medium has nothing whatsoever about the transfer of ownership of the data inside.
It doesn't work, just like transferring the copyright to a young person to make it last longer doesn't work. In places where the length of copyright depends on the death of someone, it always depends on the death of the author. You can transfer copyright, but you can't change who is the author. If I write a book, and some copyright law says the copyright ends 70 years after the death of the author, then it ends 70 years after my death. It doesn't matter who owns the copyright. PS. That dead person has heirs. If there are no relatives alive, then the government of their country will inherit everything (in most countries, there might be exceptions). Your plan fails for that reason as well. PS. See "Just a guy's" answer for another, completely different, reason why this scheme doesn't work.
An album from 2011 is pretty clearly going to be protected by copyright. Downloading such a work without permission would be copyright infringement, and therefore unlawful. However, it is not a crime in the US. If the copyright owner or the owner's agent learns of the download, you could be sued. Whether the owner would choose to bring suit is hard to say. However, for some content the Internet Archive has a program where a digital copy can be &quot;borrowed&quot; or &quot;checked out&quot; for a limited period of time. This is supposed to work like a library. The IA has made arrangements that will authorize this, or it is supposed to have done so. You only retain use of such a download for a limited period of time.
What you're describing is generally permissible in the United States. The photographer has copyright in the photograph itself, not in the items photographed. This means that they have copyright in the way that they composed the photograph -- what background they placed it against, lighting, camera placement, etc. -- but not in the ancient manuscript. If you are strictly transcribing the text of the script, you're not infringing on anything that's copyrighted. If you make a sketch, there's more potential for infringement, but I suspect that you would not be working to faithfully copy the angles of the shadows as much as you would working to faithfully copy the image and condition of the artifact. Even if you were, calling that a copyright infringement would require that the image truly be copyrighted, and I'm not 100 percent convinced that they would be. Copyright is only available to original works of authorship, and that means that the author has to make some meaningful efforts to create something new out of the copyrighted elements discussed above. But what has the photographer done in that picture of the Coronation Oath? It appears that they've photographed the book head-on, as it's displayed by the museum, with lighting as provided by the museum, in an effort to recreate the display one would see while visiting the museum. Is that really sufficiently "original" to merit copyright protection that could be invoked to prevent someone from drawing a duplicate? I doubt it. But that picture of the Ge'ez book may be different. Someone appears to have grabbed the book, opened it up under weird lighting, kept their hands in the photograph, and otherwise actually composed a photograph that may not be particularly artistic, but is nonetheless difficult enough to duplicate that it can be considered original. So let's be generous to the copyright trolls and assume that the sketch you're imagining is protected. Even then, that only raises the question of whether the copy is a fair use. You haven't said anything about how the hypothetical copier would be using these materials, but I have a hunch that the idea isn't to launch a multimillion dollar merchandising enterprise. If the idea is more academic or cultural, you'd have a better claim to fair use. Again, you can review this fair-use explainer to get a better idea.
Can he use another commercial product that is copyrighted, e.g. a map of a location (the map is a political map and has nothing to do with trees), for his tree research purposes, if such a map won't be part of the book he works on? Yes. Copyright protects particular expressions of ideas and knowledge, not the ideas and knowledge themselves. Using a map for research purposes when the map or a modified version of it does not appear in the final work does not make the final work a &quot;derivative work&quot; covered by copyright.