Intellectual property and storage medium A State owned hard drive contains intellectual property belonging to an individual. Can the State remove that hard drive from the premises of the individual without his consent? EDIT: The property was proprietary data given to the researcher in the course of his research There may be other copies around, but I believe that is more or less immaterial to the question The individual was not given the opportunity to remove the IP from the drive, and even if he was, forensic tools are available to recover that material. Followup Question: Does this mean that the owner of the hard drive can walk off with the intellectual property of the user of that drive? Does hardware ownership 'trump' the ownership of material on the hard drive? Followup Question: Does the State have the right to move an author's intellectual property from one medium to a different, possibly less secure, medium without the consent of the Author? Or, to put it another way, does the author have any rights with regard to the disposition of his intellectual property?
Assuming that the owner of the hard drive (irrespective of if that owner is a government or private person) is legally entitled to take possession of the hard drive then they can do so subject to the fact that they generally cannot commit a crime to do so (e.g. trespass or damage to property). If the person in possession of the hard drive refuses to hand it over, the owner can seek a court order to seize it - this may allow trespass etc. Any IP on the hard drive that doesn't belong to the owner of the drive is still protected by all relevant IP laws. For example, the owner of the drive cannot copy copyright material without permission unless it is in accordance with fair use/fair dealing rules.
It is absolutely not the case that Providers are not allowed to keep PII without consent. Article 6 of the GDPR identifies six possible lawful bases for processing personal information. These are: (a) the data subject has given consent ... (b) processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract; (c) processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject; (d) processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person; (e) processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller; (f) processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child. Point (f) of the first subparagraph shall not apply to processing carried out by public authorities in the performance of their tasks. If a person requests services from an online service provider, basis (b) will apply, at least to some information. If there is evidence of criminal activity, basis (c) may well apply, as it also will for much routine record keeping. Any in many such cases, basis (e) or (f) will also apply. In short, article 6 does not create a &quot;haven for online criminals/hackers&quot;. In a comment on another answer the OP writes: The offender has the right to not be identifiable and he can't be denied this right That is simply not correct. Nothing in the GDPR says anything of the sort. It is true that consent may not be forced, but if a user requests a service that service may require the user to identify him- or herself. For example, one cannot order physical goods without giving a name and a shipping address. And the provider may retain PI and even PII when it has a &quot;legitimate interest&quot; in doing so, although if challenged it must justify that legitimate interest.
Mere possession of copyrighted material does not infringe any of the copyright holder's exclusive rights.1 This conclusion is echoed by Jay Dratler: Nothing in copyright law prohibits the mere possession of an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work.2 From the Fifth Circuit: The copyright owners not only had no interest in the tangible video cassettes that contained copies of the works, but they did not have the exclusive right to possess or authorize possession of video cassettes containing copies of the works.3 From the Tenth Circuit: The Copyright Act, however, says nothing about an exclusive right to possession of a copyrighted work.4 Possession may be used as evidence that you copied the work, though. courts have held that when two works are so strikingly similar as to preclude any reasonable possibility that the defendant’s work was independently created, access may be presumed. Any circumstantial evidence of copying (i.e., proof of access and probative similarities, including the presumption of access created by striking similarities) can, however, be rebutted.5 The fact that your copy is encrypted doesn't change the copyright infringement analysis, but it may be an investigatory hurdle. 1. 17 U.S. Code § 106 2. Jay Dratler, Cyberlaw: Intellectual Property in the Digital Millennium 2-83 (2000) 3. United States v. Smith 686 F.2d 234 (5th Cir. 1982) 4. Khandji v. Keystone Resorts Management Inc. 140 F.R.D. 697 (D. Col. 1992) 5. Jason E. Sloan, An Overview of the Elements of a Copyright Infringement Cause of Action - Part I: Introduction and Copying, American Bar Association (last visited Dec. 7, 2016).
Content posted to the web is usually openly accessible to all (unless protected by a password, paywall, or similar restriction). But that does not mean it is freely copyable by all. Such content is protected by copyright in just the same way as if it had been published in a book of essays by various contributors. Unless the copyright holders (who are likely to be the original authors, but might not be) give permission, or an exception to copyright applies, copying such content would be clear and obvious copyright infringement, and any copyright holder could sue for damages. Permission could be given by publishing the content under a permissive license, such as a CC-BY-SA license, or any of many other available permissive licenses. Or a would-be reuser could find the copyright holders and ask for permission. If the holder cannot be found or identified, or does not respond, then no permission has been granted. In the US the main exception to copyright is fair use. See this answer and other threads with the fair-use tag here for more on fair use. Since the question seems to contemplate using the whole of the posted content, since it might well damage any potential market for that content, and since the use does not seem to be &quot;transformative&quot;, nor used for criticism or comment, a finding of fair use for this situation seems unlikely. But Fair use findings are very much fact-driven, and the exact facts do matter. Thus I cannot be at all sure whether a court would find this toi be fair use or not. In other countries there are a variety of exceptions to copyright, and I have not come close to reviewing them all. But none of the ones I know of seem to apply to the situation described in the question. Many are narrower than the US concept of fair use. I fear that without permission, copying this content would be infringement. However, it would not be infringement to create a site that includes a link to the existing content, and a summary or description of that content, along with new content, including comments on the old, with brief quotes to indicate what is being commented on.
You are correct that facts in general are not protected by copyright, and most raw data are facts. However, a collection of data may be protected by copyright as to its selection and organization. A use which copies such selection might possibly be copyright infringement. If data constitutes a trade secret it may be protected as such, and &quot;improper&quot; access might be unlawful. This would not apply to publicly available data or collections of data. If, to access a data set, one must sign or agree to a contract, that contract may limit the use of such data. Again, this would not apply to most publicly available data.
These documents constitute personal data and - in principle - you, as the subject, have the right to get a copy of them by issuing a "subject access request". The controller shall provide a copy of the personal data undergoing processing. For any further copies requested by the data subject, the controller may charge a reasonable fee based on administrative costs. Where the data subject makes the request by electronic means, and unless otherwise requested by the data subject, the information shall be provided in a commonly used electronic form. (Art. 15 (3) GDPR) GDPR applies to controllers of any kind, including government organisations. The subject access request can usually be a simple email. The ICO has a template for this: https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/your-right-of-access/ (but keep it simple, you can literally just ask for "all personal data" they have on you; no need to speculate on what kind of data they may have). The subject access request is sent to the actual controller, but if you don't get a response to your request after 30 days, you can file a complaint with the supervisory authority (see here for Germany; note that federal institutions are supervised by the BFDI, not the data protection authorities of the Länder). Also note that you may have to go through some trouble to be properly authenticated by the controller. They do need to be certain that you are the data subject. There are also reasons why a controller can refuse to provide some or all of the information (e.g. if your request is clearly excessive or unfounded, if it's impossible to comply without violating another data subject's rights), but I would be surprised if any of those applied in your case. Your rights can also be restricted depending on the legal basis for processing. This includes rights that are illogical as well as some that provide special protection for processors: You can't object to processing based on consent (but you can revoke your consent), fulfilment of contract (but you can cancel your contract), a legal obligation on the part of the processor, or a vital interest (but you still have the right to erasure) Your right to portability and right to erasure does not apply if processing is based on a legal obligation or a public task (justice, parliamentary or government functions, statutory functions etc.) your right to portability also doesn't apply if processing is based on vital interest (e.g to protect someone's life) or legitimate interest of the processor. It is possible that processing all or some of your data was based on the performance of a public task, in which case they will refuse your request.
Probably Not The creator or owner of a piece of software does not in general have any copyright over the output when others run the software, unless that output is itself a derivative work of input supplied by the copyright owner, or forming part of the software. In this case the translation is a derivative work of the 19th century original, but that is assumed to be in the public domain. SAo google has no copyright on the resulting translation. But copyright protection is only available for &quot;original works of authorship&quot;. (See 17 USC 102 in the US, and similar laws elsewhere.) A machine-produced translation is not an original work, and it is surely not then work of the author of the overall book. However, the author would still have a copyright on the book as a whole. The legal situation is no different than if the author had simply quoted a 19th century work. One may incorporate public domain works into a later work, and that later work is still protected by copyright, provided that there is enough original contentr to make the work as a whole &quot;an original work of authorship&quot;. Others may use the PD [arts, or the original from which they are taken, but not the rest of the work (beyond what fair use would allow in any case). For example, I have made a number of posts here on LAW.SE. In several,of those I quoted sections from one of the numbers of The Federalist. That 19th century work is in the public domain. Anyone else may re-quote the passages I quoted from it. But that gives them no rights to use the rest of my work, except as the CC-BY-SA license or fair use permits. So the author would retain copyright on the book as a whole. But soemoen who merely quotes or uses the translated 19th century article but none of the original parts of the book would not be infringing that copyright. I say probably in the header, because I do not have any actual case-law to cite here. It is possible that some court has rules otherwise on the subject of the copyright on the output of a software tool, but I strongly doubt it.
You are referring to Section 29.22 of the Copyright Act of Canada. This allows for format shifting for private purposes but only if the copy of the work or other subject-matter from which the reproduction is made is not an infringing copy and the individual legally obtained the copy of the work or other subject-matter from which the reproduction is made among some other conditions. In the case of downloading a copy from the internet, the source is likely an infringing copy (violating the first condition) and you wouldn't have legally obtained the copy of the work from which the reproduction is made (you don't even have the copy from which the reproduction is made, since it is on a remote server somewhere).