Whom can I contact if I&#39;d like to translate a literary work into my mother tongue if the writer is dead and the publishing house no longer exists? I am carrying out some little translation works for a publishing house and I, personally, want to translate a specific literary work (a novel) that impresses me a lot, into my mother tongue. But the problem is that I am quite ignorant about the copyright issues. The writer of the book I want to translate is dead, and the publishing house that first published the book no longer exists. So, how can I trace and find somebody to contact to ask whether I can or not; what are the conditions; or how much does it cost to me or to my publishing house? I avoid using the name of the book and the writer here, but if it is not something illegal or something (I mean, to state my intentions) and is necessary for you to provide me a more detailed explanation, then I can give the specific name for more accurate information.
Under Copyright? The first question is: Is this novel still under copyright. This depends on the place and date of publication. In many countries copyright now lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. Some countries use different rules. In the US, a work published before 1978 is in most cases copyrighted for 95 years. Works published after that are protected for 70 years after the death of the author. More complex cases are detailed in this well-known chart. Who holds the Copyright? For most novels, copyright is initially held by the author(s). The author may sell or give away the copyright at any time. If the author does not transfer the copyright during life, it will pass with other property st the author's death. It may pass by will or by default (intestate) inheritance in the absence of a will. The author's surviving spouse children, if any, are often the heirs to any copyrights, but not always. Authors with many works still in print may have s &quot;literary estate&quot; set up to handle their copyrights. Works with multiple co-authors usually have the copyright shared between all authors; in equal shares unless they agree otherwise. Any one copyright holder may license a derivative work such as a translation. A would-be translator of a work still under copyright must find the copyright holder(s) and obtain permission. If the holders cannot be found, no permission can be obtained, and any translation would be an infringement of copyright. The copyright holder could sue for damages after publication. Damages may be quite substantial in some cases. This varies by country and by the facts of the case. In the US The Federal Copyright Office will search its records to try to determine who holds a copyright. They charge a fee for doing so, and success is not guaranteed. Other countries may have similar services. Addition: There is no automatic or guaranteed way to find who now owns a copyright. In some cases the owner does not even know that s/he owns the copyright. If the holder died without heirs the copyright may belong to the government (state government in the US). Research into the author's life may reveal probable heirs. An obituary may list the author's children, if any. Finding them and asking is a reasonable place to start.
Copyright exists from the moment of creation of the work Copyright notices and dates are neither required nor meaningful. They are a courtesy to others. They can also have typos.
I'm not a lawyer, but under the law as it's written, I see two problems: 17 USC 121 allows "authorized entities" to make and publish accessible copies of works. An "authorized entity" is defined as a nonprofit organization or a governmental agency that has a primary mission to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities. So if you, as a private citizen, decide to do this, it could conceivably be copyright infringement. You might have to set up some kind of non-profit organization to make it legal. It's also OK (I think) if you make such copies for your own personal use, so long as you don't redistribute them. So far as I can tell, nothing under 17 USC 121 requires the original publisher to provide an "authorized entity" with a copy in any particular format (PDF, paper, or otherwise) for making accessible copies. Basically, the law seems to have envisioned organizations of sighted people purchasing paper copies, transcribing them, and republishing them; not blind individuals doing electronic transcription for themselves. It might still be worth contacting Hal Leonard and asking what they can do for you, but unfortunately it doesn't look like the law requires them to do anything for you. As Nij points out in the comments, this really seems to be a question about the company's policy, rather than the law.
They are copyright violations. They are periodically shut down in waves that shut down the entire genre when the industry decides that they are impacting sales negatively and mount a coordinated campaign. I know of two such crackdowns in the last 25 years or so. I reported on the most recent major crackdown of which I am aware, when it happened in the summer of 2010. An academic journal article on the subject from 2009 entitled "Between fan culture and copyright infringement: manga scanlation" by Hye-Kyung Lee has also looked into the subject and discusses a previous crackdown. There are several other academic journal articles on the subject but my links to them have gone stale. In 2010 and the previous crackdown, publishers had previously done very little international distribution of magna in translation, so this black market arose to address the unmet demand (mostly on a non-profit volunteer basis by devoted fans). But, in 2010, publishers were just starting to greatly increase their investment in paid international distribution of manga in translation, so they needed to clear the field to satisfy their new foreign partners in the international distribution process. The development of profitable business models for natively web based comics and manga, such as the Korean based commercial webtoons website, has reduced demand for copyright violating content in this space somewhat by providing alternative content, as has much greater industry sponsored international distribution of manga in translation through contracted and licensed affiliate companies outside of the publisher's home countries. This doesn't happen more often because the economic gains from doing so are often marginal, it is expensive to mount an enforcement campaign, it is ineffectual to deal with one site at a time (leading to whack-a-mole situations where new sites arise as quickly as old ones are shut down), enforcement campaigns can generate ill will towards the magna publishers among fans, and the pirate sites can generate new revenue that offsets the revenue lost (e.g. boosting sales of merchandise and sales of volumes that haven't yet been translated that fans learn about from the illegal websites). The industry mounts campaigns only when they feel that pirate sites are out of hand and seriously denting their revenues, or when an offender is particularly offensive or profitable. Scanlation sites, in which magna are translated into other languages, particular those that translate manga into languages in which the publisher doesn't have an official translated version, receive particularly lenient treatment from publishers contemplating whether to mount an enforcement campaign, because they don't hurt revenues materially. Scanlations of works into orphan languages are protected under some countries' copyright laws, if a translation has not been done into that language after a certain (short) number of years, but not in the U.S. or E.U. or Japan or Korea or Taiwan, which have some of the biggest markets for manga.
I'm wondering whos responsible for this code if people start using it? The user. Can the people using it that think its under GPL in any way get in trouble for it or be made to remove it from their projects? Yes, they can be sued (successfully) for copyright violation. It’s not enough that you think you have permission from the copyright holder - you actually have to have permission. The law places the onus on the copier to seek out and get permission from the copyright holder. In theory, someone deceived in this way could sue the repo poster(s) for misrepresentation, however, there are practical issues about finding them, having them in an accessible jurisdiction and if they are judgement proof. Copyright law was created to protect physical books and paintings - it doesn’t really fit with digital methods of reproduction but it is the law. It doesn’t matter that complying with it can be hard bordering on impossible - comply with it you must.
Usually not, usually Translating literary works is generally regarded as an adaptation, but I don't think translation programs—and HTML and Markdown, two markup languages with similar principles—are adaptations. According to the description on Creative Commons, Merely changing the format never creates a derivative. So changing WAV to MP3 is not considered an adaptation, nor is changing DOC to PDF. As for HTML and Markdown, it seems a bit vague, but it can be said that although their encoding methods are different, the results presented are very similar. According to https://creativecommons.org/faq/#when-is-my-use-considered-an-adaptation, a modification rises to the level of an adaptation under copyright law when the modified work is based on the prior work but manifests sufficient new creativity to be copyrightable Adaptation produces a derivative. A derivative contains both the will of the original author and the adapter. Creation involves choice, the painter chooses the colors to use, and the translator chooses the words to translate. There are inherently fewer options to create a program. Rendering markdown to html can be done directly through other programs, and it is difficult to see the shadow of the adapter. Editorial originality is very import. Yet one more thing is important: legal definitions. This is what it says in the https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-an-adaptation FQA page What constitutes an adaptation depends on applicable law So, the laws of where you live still matter. We all know that there is a large gray area in copyright law, which often makes everything depend on the actual situation. This is just a little bit of my personal thoughts for your reference :)
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.
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.