Does copyright no longer apply if one cannot find the owner? Suppose a work was originally published in France (and in French) , in 1940. Suppose the author (Georges Macron) died in 1980. Suppose it was translated into English, and published in English in 1955. and the translator (Francis Farmer) died in 1995. Suppose the original French publisher went out of business in 1963, and there was no single successor company. Suppose the English-language publisher went out of business in 1975, and again there is no single successor company. Suppose that John Reaper has written a new book in English. This new book reproduces many whole pages (say 70) of the 1955 translation, plus 15 full,-page illustration from that edition. John Reaper has approached the publishers of more recent editions of the translation (all of them from before 1990). John has approached the grand children of macron, and the heirs of Farmer (who had no children). He has looked through the records of the copyright offices in France, the UK, and the US, and has written to everyone named in those records as holding copyright in the book or its translation, or as being an agent of any such owner. No one has admitted to holding the rights to the 1955 translation, or to knowing who does hold those rights. Assume that the new book is an expansion and revision of the original book, not a commentary on or analysis of the original, and is not likely to qualify as a fair use of the original. [Note that these details of publication dates and death dates are given to make it clear that the book is still under copyright in various countries, and to make it clear what sort of efforts John has gone to while trying tro secure permission.] Can John Reaper lawfully publish his new book with a note: Pages {numbers} are taken from the 1955 edition of {title} a translation of {french title} by Georges Macron. The holder of copyright in that work could not be found after diligent search. If anyone holds those rights or knows who does, please contact me at {address} and proper arrangements will be made. If John does this, can he be successfully sued for copyright infringement of the 1955 translation or of the 1940 original? John wants to publish in the US, the UK, and France and other EU countries. This is based on comments to Can I print scans of a book&#39;s pages in my book? in this stack.
No, John may not lawfully publish such a book in such a way What John wants to do is not lawful. It would infringe on the copyright on both the 1940 original, and on the 1955 translation. Both of those are still in copyright under the laws of France, the UK, and the US. Someone owns those copyrights: some person or business or other entity. If the owner has no legal heirs, in most jurisdictions the property escheats to the government (in the US to the state government). In the case of a company, its assets will be sold or handed over to some entity. But they will not become ownerless, any more than real estate will become ownerless when the owner dies or the owning company is dissolved. It is possible that the owner does not realize that s/he owns these rights. But if John publishes his book, then owner might then realize the rights that s/he holds. The owner could demand payment, or sue for damages. Under US law the damages could include any economic loss that the owner has incurred plus any profits that John or his publisher have made. John and his publisher would both be liable for these damages. As a result, no publisher is likely to be willing to publish John's book. If John self-publishers, he incurs the risk of such demands and suit. In some countries (such as the UK) there are legal procedures fore dealing with such &quot;orphan works&quot;. In those countries one can register with a government agency, and obtain permission to use the work after a search has revealed no owner, paying a rate set by law. But there is no such provision in the US. There, John must either not publish, or gamble that no owner will appear and make demands he cannot afford to meet.
According to CENDI, yes the US government is able to claim copyright on works internationally. The law in question which makes US government works public domain in the US (17 U.S. Code § 105) only does so within the confines of US copyright. Since copyright protection is on a per-country basis, there's no reason that the US government couldn't assert IP rights under foreign copyright law (though I didn't go looking for an example). While the Berne Convention generally requires countries to provide foreign works the same protection as domestic works, I can think of two general reasons why US government works wouldn't fall under copyright protection in some countries: The country simply doesn't apply copyright protection to any government works (don't know how common this is). The country applies the rule of the shorter term. If they do, they aren't required to provide a longer term of protection than the country of origin does (which is nil in this case).
I don't see how. Remember that a license is a contract where the author gives permission to copy (modify, redistribute, remix, etc) a copyrighted work, provided that the licensee fulfills the stated conditions. If the license is not in effect, then we revert to the default situation under copyright law, which is that the potential licensee has no rights to copy the work. (Not counting particular instances of copying which are permitted under fair use and similar exceptions - I presume that's not what you have in mind, or the whole question is moot.) In this case, the conditions include that the licensee must credit the author under their chosen pseudonym. The licensee can't get out of that obligation simply because they find it distasteful or objectionable for whatever reason. If they don't want to do it, then they should not accept the license in the first place, and so refrain from copying the work. (Of course, if the author is offering the CC license in hopes of encouraging reuse of the work, then this may not be a desirable outcome for the author, so they might want to think twice about their choice of pseudonym.) Even if the author's pseudonym were something that would actually be illegal to quote (say, because it is obscene), I don't think it lets the licensee off the hook. A contract with illegal terms is void, so legally it is as if there is no license at all, and we revert to the default in which there is no right to copy. A question was raised in comments about the word &quot;reasonable&quot;. I don't know of case law where this has been tested, so I can only speculate: The context suggests that &quot;reasonable&quot; is intended to refer to the means of attribution (for instance, where the attribution should appear in a piece of source code or documentation), not to the pseudonym. There's a legal principle that the specific governs over the general, and the requirement to credit the author by a particular pseudonym is clearly more specific than the general requirement of &quot;reasonableness&quot;. It seems clear that the author, who is the one offering these terms, didn't intend for the general term &quot;reasonable&quot; to render meaningless their request for the use of a specific pseudonym; if they had, why would they have bothered to put it in? On the flip side, there's the principle of contra proferentem, that ambiguities in a contract should be resolved in the favor of the party that didn't draft it - here, the licensee. But it's hard to argue that this is really ambiguous; it seems quite clear what the author wants. Of course, the author can circumvent the whole issue, if they're worried, by licensing the work instead under a modified version of the CC license in which the word &quot;reasonable&quot; is removed. After all, there is nothing particular magical about CC's language: the contract is whatever the author and the licensee agree to, and they're just using the pre-written CC license as a convenience to streamline their negotiations.
The Google terms of service do not prohibit using their translate programs to create something that you sell. TOS for using their API would be irrelevant, since that isn't what you're doing. There is no clear copyright issue: as far as I can tell, there is not yet any case law suggesting that the output of a program can be owned by the copyright-holder of the program. (Copyright must be held by a legal person, i.e. an actual person or a corporation, and a program cannot yet be a legal person). A human-performed translation is subject to copyright protection since what is protected is that which is created by the (translating) author, and a program lacks that creative element. A translation owes its existence to the program-user using a particular tool to create the work, be it a pen or a translation program. What is unclear at present is whether a person using machine translation in a permitted fashion to create a derivative work thereby gains copyright to that derived work.
This appears to mean that the author, while retaining copyright, is allowing anyone to make copies without asking permission from the author. This would seem to be similar to a CC-BY license, or perhaps more exactly a CC-BY-ND license, as the author has apparently not granted the right to create modified versions or other derivative works. This does not require one who makes such copies to distribute them free of charge, unless there is another provision not mentioned in the question. Amazon, or anyone else, would be free to sell copies at any price they cared to ask. If the author wanted to limit the sales price, that would take another provision, and might not be enforceable.
The exact timing of this story makes a bit of a difference, as you're placing the story right around the time of the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, which changed the rules for works first published after March 1, 1989. Before then, most copyrightable works were only treated as protected if they included a proper copyright notice, which required the copyright symbol (or &quot;copyright&quot; or &quot;copr.&quot;), the year of first publication, and the original copyright owner. So if this happened in February 1989, the lawyer was correct that you needed to include &quot;a proper copyright notice.&quot; But he was probably mistaken to think that your rendering was problematic. The copyright symbol required was the same circled C that you mentioned, but the Copyright Office will also recognize a variant on the symbol if it &quot;resembles the © closely enough to indicate clearly that the variant is intended to be the copyright symbol.&quot; The office's current guidance makes clear that your variant would be sufficient: Acceptable variants include: The letter c with a parenthesis over the top. The letter c with a parenthesis under the bottom. (c c) (c) The letter c with an unenclosed circle around it. Examples of unacceptable variants on the © symbol include the following: CO C C/O @ (i.e., the letter a in a circle). The letter c with a circle attached to the bottom of the letter. The letter c in a square. [c] The same was true under the guidance that would have been in effect at the time. See section 1005.01(c)(6). If the advice came after March 1, 1989, the notice would not have been strictly necessary, regardless of how you rendered it.
The audio book would probably be an infringing derivative work because the client could redistribute it once the client received it. It sounds very much like a product that is regularly sold by merchants relying on copyrights. Conceivably, simply reading a book aloud to a client in some sort of streaming context that could't be shared with others or replayed would merely be fair use, much like hiring a baby sitter to read a book aloud to your children would be clearly fair use. If there were an automatic text to sound converter as opposed to an individualized performance, it might not be considered infringing. There are people with programs that do this who haven't been sued, but the boundaries haven't been explored very thoroughly. Honestly, there isn't a lot of guidance in this area from statutory language, and the questions would often not be guided by much case law involving similar facts. Your intuition living in the modern world is probably almost as good as a lawyer's in this situation.
The Organization Does Not Own the Copyright As you were clearly not an employee of the organization, and did not have a specific contract with them, this was not a &quot;work-made-for-hire&quot; (WFH). Therefore, the copyright initially belonged to the author, in this case the programmer, that is you. That being so, it would require a written document to transfer the copyright to another during your lifetime. In future there should be a written agreement in such a case, spelling out just what rights are to be retained by whom. It can save lots of trouble. The organization would have an implied license to use the software. The terms of this would be defined by the conduct of the parties, and might be a matter of dispute. Probably there would be a non-exclusive license without any fee or ending date. Probably there would be no license to distribute to others unless you explicitly grant one. Specific US Laws 17 USC 101 defines a WFH: A “work made for hire” is— (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a “supplementary work” is a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an “instructional text” is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities. (emphasis added) 17 USC 201 provides that: (a) Initial Ownership. — Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work. The authors of a joint work are coowners of copyright in the work. (b) Works Made for Hire. — In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright. ... (d) Transfer of Ownership.— (d) (1) The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law, and may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property by the applicable laws of intestate succession. (d) (2) Any of the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, including any subdivision of any of the rights specified by section 106, may be transferred as provided by clause (1) and owned separately. The owner of any particular exclusive right is entitled, to the extent of that right, to all of the protection and remedies accorded to the copyright owner by this title. 17 USC 204 provides that: (a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent.