Copying HTML: copyright violation? (I'm reposting this from workplace S.E. where I was advised to ask here; apologies in advance for any inconvenience) tl;dr: in the USA, is copying the HTML code from a site (any site whose code is presumably copyrighted) and storing it, for a limited or unlimited amount of time a violation of copyright? Are there prior lawsuits related to this? I'm mostly interested in the particular case where the copy is not reproduced, but kept private. I've recently learned that this is indeed the case. This came as a huge surprise to me since: [First of all] most browsers retain a copy of the HTML (for the period of the visit or much longer, if caching is enabled) Proxy servers often keep cached copies of these files Web archives (like Google's) not only copy all assets of a site it find to keep historical versions of these pages but also make available to the general public these historical copies. Programs that scrape external sites often have in their repositories copies of (likely copyrighted) HTML for testing purposes Number (4) is the one that directly affects the company I work for, since we do web analysis and therefore write programs that visit other sites. For example, we make extensive use of vcrpy library to record external accesses and test our code against these "frozen" HTMLs. Also, specifically in our case, we don't really copy the entirety of any site, since we are only concerned with a subset of its pages, but from what I've been informed, that doesn't seem to qualify as "fair use", such as quoting a passage of a book (where, in a sense, the book would be analogous to the entire site with all its public assets). We don't even copy assets like CSS files or images, so we can't reproduce the actual content in full. After I was told that such copies are likely unlawful, we are not only being limited to explore more robust testing methodologies (which would likely make use of a large amount of HTML copied from the web in a local storage) but the current use of vcrpy library has become something that demanded analysis (as it's not clear if our use of it is unlawful).
You are clearly seeking legal advice. Answers on this site come from anonymous people on the internet and are not legal advice. You should not act based on information from this site. I am unaware of any lawsuit where one would be sued for merely storing and reading HTML for personal use. Downloading a webpage is probably not a copyright violation. Most things you create, including HTML source code, are protected by copyright and copyright includes the exclusive right to choose who can read what you created. I couldn't find any actual reference to this but I would hazard a guess that displaying an HTML webpage online is implicitly allowing others to read that code. I believe this guess is correct because all modern web browsers have the capability to view source that nobody considers illegal and browsers also include the capability to save webpages to disk. These browsers are made by companies with large legal departments, I doubt Internet Explorer would include this function if using it was a copyright violation. Here begins speculation: However, your expanded question says that not only you wish to read the HTML code but you also wish to process it, extract information from it and use what you learn this way. This could, I think, be prevented by the copyright holder. Still, what you are describing is commonly done in the world. Services such as Google, Bing or the Wayback Machine go far beyond what you are doing. In theory, I can see this as being a copyright violation but again, the fact that these big companies - without any kind of contract with the website owners - keep doing it is big evidence in favor of legality of storing webpages. You should be careful about how you use the stored data, though. For example, computer programs often have a stipulation in EULA that prevents you from reverse engineering the code. I could see that the use of some websites could be protected in such manner. Further (not authoritative) internet pages on this topic: https://stackoverflow.com/q/22819287/1580088 https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120621055815AAvJPvN
Yes So far so good. This is a copyright violation but it is probably fair use - certainly there is case law permitting a copy of a backup digital asset to be made so I don’t see why a similar argument wouldn’t work with backing up a physical book. Clear copyright violation. Alice can rent out the original under the first sale doctrine but the ‘backup’ is not so protected. It’s not fair use because it’s use is commercial, the work is a type of work the author expects to profit from, the entire work has been copied and the use is deleterious to the market i.e. the renters are less likely to buy an original - it falls foul of all four factors of the fair use test.
Quoting content may or may not constitute copyright infringement, depending on the various factors that go into the fair use defense. Short quotes which are made for the purpose of discussion, research and commentary and not for copy would be squarely in the domain of "fair use" under US law. That means that the copyright owner would not succeed in suing you for quoting them: under the statutory mechanism for recognizing his right to his intellectual product, there is a limit on how much control he can exert over your behavior (since the two of you have not worked out some kind of agreement -- copyright law creates rights even when there is no contract). As for Facebook, you have a contract with them, embodied in the terms of service. You have been given permission to access material that they host (permission is required, under copyright law), and their permission is conditional. It says "you may access stuff on our platform only as long as you do X": if that includes a clause "don't be nasty", then that limits your right to speak freely and be as nasty as you'd like. If it says "don't quote even a little", that means you cannot quote even a little, even when you would have the statutory right to quote a little (or, to be nasty). Fair use would mean that you can't be sued for copyright infringement of the stuff that you quoted a little of. You can, however, be expelled from Facebook. You probably cannot be sued for "accessing Facebook without permission". There is a federal law against unauthorized access of computer networks, and there was a failed attempt to construe violation of a TOS as "unauthorized access" – it isn't. But accessing Facebook necessarily involves copying (that's how computers work), and there is no "fair use" defense whereby everybody has a fair use right to access Facebook. Theoretically you could be sued for copyright infringement, for accessing Facebook's intellectual property without permission. Also, Facebook can rescind your permission to access their content (see this case), and once you have been banned, it is a crime to further access their network. This assumes that there is no overriding limit on contracts that would nullify a no-quoting condition. There is no such limit on contracts in the US, so such a contract would be enforceable. There is also nothing illegal (unenforceable) about a TOS which prohibits automated methods of access.
If you change a single character, that's clearly a partial copy. Copyright protection has a limited extent, however. The protected work must be original and not obvious. For example, there are only so many ways to write a function that computes the average of two numbers, so the copyright owner of one body of code cannot claim infringement by the author of a second body of code simply because they both have a function float Average(float a, float b) { return (a + b) / 2; } A surefire way to avoid infringing copyright is to specify the function of the code and then have someone who has never seen the code write it from scratch. This is sometimes called clean-room engineering. Otherwise, there is no way to answer your question definitively. If you create a modified copy of the code (a "derived work" in copyright terminology), there is no strict formula available to evaluate the extent of the infringement. It comes down to a case-specific analysis of the facts by a judge. Depending on the jurisdiction, which you have not specified, there may be specific laws or judicial precedent that guide the judge, but the determination will still require a specific analysis of the facts. For example, if the alleged infringer raises these arguments, the judge would have to determine how obvious the code is, or whether the copyright claimant even owns the copyright to the code.
Evaluating a potential copyright violation is very fact-intensive, so we don't have enough information to answer the question. Making a copy is generally going to be a copyright violation, but there's still going to be a lot of breathing room under the fair use doctrine. Again, we'd need more details to provide a useful answer, but you may be able to analyze the question yourself using the following information. Analysis of fair-use defenses looks at four questions, and the answers to the questions can tip the scales in favor of or against a finding of fair use: Does your kind of copying affect the market for the original? To what extent can your copy fulfill the demand for the original? What if there were widespread copying of the kind you're considering? The more potential there is for the copies to replace the original, the less likely it is to be fair use. This is the most important factor in the analysis. Why did you make the copy? If you made the copy for purposes of news reporting, criticism, or commentary, it's more likely to be fair use. If you made a copy just so you could watch again later whenever you feel like it, that's may still be fair use, but it is somewhat less likely. If you made a copy so you could sell it for profit, that's almost certainly not fair use. How much did you copy? Did you copy the whole thing, or did you copy only as much as you needed to achieve your purpose under Question 2? If you copy "too much" -- both in the raw amount and as a fraction of the whole work -- it's less likely to be fair use. What did you copy? Such works can be copyrighted but are not part of the Highly creative works, such as poems, music, and movies, are at the "core" of copyright principles. A fair use analysis will be more stringent in these cases than when copying a purely factual work, such as a phone book, biography, or list of statistics. This is the least important factor in the analysis. So take all of those and imagine the answer to each on a spectrum. If you see things generally tipping in the direction of fair use, that's a good indication that you're going to be safe. If you see things tipping in the other direction, you may want to reconsider. Again, these can be notoriously tricky questions. If you're dealing with a real situation, you should consult an attorney to get an answer specific to your situation.
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.
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.
Ideas (methods of playing, game mechanics, strategy, goals) cannot be protected by copyright. But any part of a creative work can. So, no copying of drawings, patterns, images, sounds, or the element. I suppose copying the software code is not an issue here, but it can, obviously, also not be copied. And nothing in your game can look like someone's else trademark.