Republishing in old book, what are ones rights and obligations? I have an old book on shelf, published in, and copyright date of 1913 (US). Looking over a copyright law page on the subject, I am thinking the copyright has expired but am not 100% sure. What kind of research do I need to do to reasonably determine the copyright has expired? What I am considering doing is scanning the book, the pictures in it (photos and hand art), then perhaps self publishing the results on amazon or maybe a website. Assuming the copyright has expired and there is no infringement, I publish it online, what (copy?)rights would I then have if any?
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.
You would first have to find out if publishing a book was &quot;for commercial purposes&quot;. I can write a book and publish it as a hobby. Next you check if there is any copyright infringement. It doesn't sound like there is. Using your website as a tool to create these diagrams doesn't give you copyright unless the result contains your own copyrighted work. So at best there is a violation of your terms and conditions for your website. You can sue about that, but might have to specify damages. If you allow commercial use say for a fee of $1,000, that would give you grounds to claim damages. Or if someone used your website so excessively that it costs you money, that would be damages.
There aren't bright line rules in the area of fair use (which is the core issue - you are clearly copying a work that has copyright protected portions, at least - the question is whether fair use provides a defense and whether some portions are not copyright protected). This inquiry is fact specific and driven by general standards. Context such as whether the use would be free or commercial matter as well. For your own notes, anything goes pretty much. This generally wouldn't constitute "publication" of the work and would be for personal educational used by someone who paid for the book anyway. For shared notes - it depends. Also not all kinds of copying is created equal. Some parts of textbooks are themselves in the public domain or not protectable by copyright. For example, even a lengthy quote from a scientific journal article would probably be allowed with attribution. It would also be easier to evaluate based upon the type of textbook. A history textbook can have protection similar to trade non-fiction and can have very original exposition. An algebra textbook, less so. Your question also points to an end run. If the professor is the author of the textbook (many of mine were in something of a racket), you could get permission from the author.
It's not clear to me that your website is, per se, illegal. (Though good luck finding a webhost with a hard drive large enough to store it. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is roughly 38,000 characters. If I've done my calculations correctly, storing all of the strings of this length or shorter would require something like 1053760 GB of storage. Give or take.) The main problem is in distributing the &quot;index&quot; of the string containing the text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This index is just the integer obtained by taking the entire text as a string and treating it as a number in base 26 (A = 1, B = 2, etc.) In other words, all of the information contained in the book is also contained in the index number, and in a relatively simple way. Distributing this number is therefore entirely equivalent to distributing the text; you don't need the website at all. It's entirely analogous to e-mailing the text to someone else; in that process, the text is transformed into a number (in binary, under a different encoding scheme) along the way. But you couldn't seriously argue in a court of law that you were not distributing the text, you were just telling a friend about a very large number. Just to back this up with some actual law citation: US copyright law gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to make and distribute copies of the work. And a &quot;copy&quot; is defined as follows: “Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. In other words, J.K. Rowling (and/or her publishers) have the exclusive rights to distribute that integer, since the work is &quot;fixed&quot; in it by its very nature, and since the work can be reproduced from it.
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.
A translation is a devivative work - the copyright owner has the exclusive right to these So, yes, translation is prima facie copyright infringement. Strictly speaking, if you translate it, it's a derivative work because you exercised creativity in making the translation; what Google translate does is not a derivative work, it's a copy because there is no creativity. Either way, only the copyright owner can do (or authorise) this. Whether it's legal or not depends on if what you are doing falls within one of the exceptions to the applicable copyright law such as fair use or fair dealing. Attributing the original author does not, of itself, allow translation. Additionally, I'm not able to find the copyright documentation for the site link I provided above. What is "copyright documentation"? Copyright exists the moment a work is created and no further documentation is required. Essentially, I could translate the whole documentation by myself to avoid this problem. No, you can't - see above. If copy-pasting the google translate is illegal, then exactly how much must I edit, move around sentences, change words, and such until the text is no longer plagiarized? All of it. If you were, based on your own knowledge of the software, to write a manual without any copying o the existing manual, that would not be copyright infringement. Is this plagiarism or copyright infringement? It's copyright infringement - plagiarism is an academic misconduct issue not a legal one. where can I check the copyright for the above link? The site you linked has "Copyright © 2020 Acquia, Inc. All Rights Reserved" in the bottom left corner which identifies the copyright holder, the date and prohibits all copying ("all rights reserved"). This isn't necessary but it is helpful. If you really want to do this, contact Acquia, Inc and ask for permission.
Yes. The copyright owner of a work has the exclusive right to "reproduce the copyrighted work" or to make "derivative works" of it. 17 USC 106. Copyright law is older than the photocopier, and it applies to copies made by means of any technology. If your intent is to duplicate the protected work, whether you do it by tracing, photocopying, or even freehand, you are infringing that right. It is possible that you could squeeze into one of the copyright exceptions, such as fair use, but these are much narrower than people tend to assume they are (especially outside of the U.S.), and they boil down to: "Well, yes, I copied your copyrighted work, but..." The bottom line is: is it copyrighted? Did you copy it, in whole or in part? Then, unless you have a very good reason, you've infringed the copyright. Whether you do it by means of tracing paper, jellygraph, or iPhone doesn't matter.
For works released after 1989, Copyright notices don't have any legal consequences in the United States. They are just a friendly reminder of who created the work and that they take their copyrights seriously. But those notices are not required anymore to enforce your copyrights on the works you created. If you have proof that you own the copyright on something and when it was created, and if it's still within the term limits, then you can take legal actions against people who violate your copyright. Disney has a history of repeated worldwide lobbying for extending the expiration durations in copyright laws in order to avoid any of their classic cartoons from falling out of copyright protection. So it could be that they try to intentionally muddy the waters and make it harder to find out which of their works expire when. That way people are less sure about what Disney works are and are not in the public domain, making it more risky to use them. But that's just my theory.