Is it plagiarism to make a parody? I created a comics/cartoons Facebook page a few time ago, and I also published my work on reddit. And I made a humoristic comic featuring Spider-Man and Deadpool (two characters owned by Marvel Comics for those who know). (you can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/user/yacinem98). But someone there told me that it was plagiarism to use these characters (especially if I put the "Original Content" tag over the image with my signature). So I'm asking if this work is considered as a parody/satire or plagiarism? I also made humoristic comics featuring characters from Star Wars and others from Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball Z manga but hesitated to publish them due to this. (as the person who warned me told me that big companies owning these characters won't let it slip if my comics make it big)
This is not plagiarism Plagiarism is the use of another person's ideas or work (especially direct quotes or close paraphrases) without attribution. While it is not strictly a legal concept, in academia and certain other contexts, it is considered serious misconduct and a form of academic dishonesty that can be grounds for revoking a degree or award, for refusing to grant an academic title, or good cause for terminating even a tenured professor from his or her employment. Plagiarism used to obtain an academic credential, which, in turn, causes someone to secure a job is considered a form of employment application fraud by many employers that could result in the termination of the person's employment, particularly if the credential is a master's degree with a thesis requirement or a PhD and the plagiarism is in the thesis or dissertation which was required to obtain that degree. If an academic credential is relied upon as a credential when seeking a political office, plagiarism is often considered grounds to vote against the candidate or to ask for their resignation. In a parliamentary system, cabinet officers who were found to have engaged in plagiarism for a credential relevant to their ministry assignment will often resign at the request (actually a polite demand) of the prime minister (or in the case of the prime minister of other influential party members or the President or constitutional monarch). Referring to someone else's ideas or work is actually welcome in academic writing, and attribution may be by footnote or endnote, by a short form reference in a text accompanied by a bibliography, by a hyperlink, or in the body text in the vicinity of the reference. As applicable to you, and as is common particularly in editorial cartoons and video or audio reporting/comedy, there are some references which are so widely known that making them is an implied attribution even if none of the formal methods of attributing a reference are used. For example, if someone says &quot;A Rose By Any Other Name Is Just As Sweet&quot;, there is an implied attribution to the Shakespeare sonnet, even if no formal attribution is given and this is not considered plagiarism. Similarly, in physics, if someone says regarding an experimental result in a physics paper, &quot;Who ordered that?&quot; or &quot;God doesn't play dice with the universe.&quot; or one talks in economics about &quot;lassiez faire&quot;, those quotations and ideas are so famous that a lack of formal attribution does not constitute plagiarism. In a fictional work, such an unattributed but clear reference is considered an &quot;homage&quot; rather than plagiarism. In a related notion, in fiction, the &quot;scène à faire&quot; doctrine of copyright law provides that certain tropes derived from other writers works are not considered copyright violations (and are also not considered plagiarism) if they are genre conventions using by many different works in the genre that help define it. Visual or express references to Spiderman, Deadpool and Star Wars or Dragon Ball Z characters, presented to an audience in which many members of the audience are familiar with these famous characters are not plagiarism because there is an implied attribution. Everybody who recognizes these characters at all knows obviously that you are not really claiming to have created them and that their true creator is widely known. Even though you tag it as an &quot;original work&quot;, it is clear that you are not claiming to have invented these characters and this is clear to anyone in the intended audience. If you wanted to be squeaky clean on the plagiarism front, you could including a fine print disclaimer with each comic having the characters stating that &quot;Spiderman is a character created by Stan Lee and . . . for Marvel Comics and I make no claim to being an original creator of this character.&quot;, or something similar as the case may be. Copyright issues Your comics are almost by definition &quot;derivative works&quot; because they are based on the copyrighted work of others, so they are infringing the copyright of the persons owning copyrights to those works, presumably without a license from the owner of the copyrights to do so. But, parody is one of the best established, clearest and broadest categories of fair use, which is a defense to a claim of copyright infringement, to the extent that it is almost a separate defense. So long as what you are writing is truly parody, and not merely humorous &quot;fan fiction&quot; (i.e. an infringing derivative work in which you use the characters and worlds originally developed in the source author's works as an expansion of the original author's works in that world, rather than as a parody of the original work), you have a strong fair use defense and have not violated copyright law. A &quot;humoristic comic&quot; use of protected characters is not necessarily satire or parody, although it could be, as satire and parody are usually (although not always) funny, at least in a grim humor kind of way. If Spiderman and Deadpool are being used to make fun of government policies rather than, for example, fighting crime, there is a good chance that it is satire and protected. If Star Wars characters are being used to mock the original franchise (e.g. in a piece pointing out all of the safety regulation violations in the Death Star such as a lack of hand rails), this would safely be parody. But, if one of these characters is merely used to present new examples of the kind of humor present in the original works, the satire and parody defenses of fair use and whatever it is called in the trademark context, would not apply. It wouldn't hurt to put a disclaimer stating, &quot;This comic is intended as satire and parody, and is produced without a license from the copyright owners of the original works implicitly referenced in this comic.&quot;, so that your intent is clear. This isn't an absolute defense. Saying it is a parody or satire does not make it so. But, this could clarify your intent in a close case where your parody or satire intent is more obscure than you had hoped that it would be. Trademark issues The case of trademark law is trickier. Most famous fictional characters of major multi-media fiction producing empires like Marvel Comics, the Star Wars franchise, and major anime series, are protected not just by copyright but also by trademarks covering all developed work countries in many major product markets including but also apart from just comic books, and furthermore these trademarks have extra protections associated with &quot;famous&quot; trademarks, and are &quot;incontestable&quot; due to their age. Despite widespread inaccurate beliefs to the contrary, a trademark is not an exclusive right to use a word or image or other distinctive thing with &quot;secondary meaning&quot; that associates it with the trademark owner. Instead, trademark rights protect the owner only from the use of a trademark to sell goods or services in a product market covered by the trademark in a geographic area to which the trademark extends. The classic trademark violation is trying to, for example, sell knockoff shoes as &quot;Vans&quot; when they are not made under license from or in association with the company that owns that brand name, in a way that misleads the customer (it is legal to have a labels that says &quot;compare to Vans&quot; thus making clear that it is not actually a product belonging to that brand). There is also a less well established and less clear, but meaningful, parody exception to trademark infringement. Using trademarked famous characters in a non-parody way in connection with the marketing and content of a comic would be a trademark infringement as well as a potential derivative works violation of a copyright. You could also argue that you aren't using the trademark to sell a product (so called &quot;nominative use&quot;), but are instead being used to compare your product or to reflect their presence in daily life. However, if these characters are integral to your comic and its appeal, as opposed to a mere nominative use, this won't help you either. For example, if you have a completely original character say in passing &quot;Spiderman never pooped in his suit.&quot;, that would probably be an homage or a nominative use which would be acceptable. But, if you had Spiderman and Deadpool engage in some physical humor of the kind they do in the comics and movies, this would probably be an infringement. Practical considerations The corporations that own the rights to the characters you have mentioned are billion dollar companies with an intense interest in protecting their intellectual property, so, in a close case, even if you ultimately win, you could end up in a very expensive legal battle against an opponent with deep pockets and a strategic and economic interest in pushing the extent of their intellectual property protections to their maximum extent. So, even if you are probably in the right, you may want to tread carefully in areas that are probably gray areas because you can afford to fight that kind of litigation without outside help which may not be available if your case doesn't look obviously sympathetic on the merits.
A document can be distributed under more than one license. Just because it has been made available under a CC license for free, doesn't mean that IEEE can't negotiate a different license with different terms that allow them to sell the content. (This is similar to the way that a software library can be available for free under a license that permits non-commercial use, but also be made available for a fee for commercial use.) If you want to know whether IEEE is legally selling Aaron Swartz's manuscript, you can contact Morgan &amp; Claypool, the publisher that owns the copyright, and ask them whether this use by IEEE has been authorized by them. For the other documents you mention, contact MIT Press. Etc.
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.
It seems that you don’t understand what parody is. If you do understand, please explain how it’s even possible to parody computer code. What you can do with “open source” code depends on the licence the copyright holder(s) release it under. For some very permissive licences you can do what you suggest, for most, you can’t.
Expression is tied up with fixation. Copyright subsists in a work that is fixed in a tangible medium of expression from which they can be reproduced, perceived, or communicated. 17 USC 102 This expression is protected, not the idea. However, copyright infringement can occur even when there is not an exact copy. First, courts use a substantial similarity standard to determine if infringement has occurred. Second, when a character or plot is sufficiently developed, taking that character or that plot can be infringement, even if not expressed in the exact same manner. "We do not doubt that two plays may correspond in plot closely enough for infringement [...] the less developed the characters, the less they can be copyrighted; that is the penalty an author must bear for marking them too indistinctly." Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation, 45 F.2d 119 (2d Cir. 1930) Some characters or plot elements are so common to a genre that they are either not considered "original" enough to get copyright protection, or can be taken by others without being considered infringement. This is the scènes à faire doctrine. "Stock scenes and hackneyed character types that "naturally flow from a common theme"—are considered "ideas," and therefore are not copyrightable. But as plots become more intricately detailed and characters become more idiosyncratic, they at some point cross the line into "expression" and are protected by copyright." Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F. 3d 1257 - Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit 2001 See Amanda Schreyer's An Overview of Legal Protection for Fictional Characters: Balancing Public and Private Interests for many more cases and examples of the idea-expression dichotomy in action with respect to fictional characters.
Plagiarism is an academic category about the thoughts from another scholar/author. Copyright is a legal category about the words of another writer. When a student or a degree candidate present a paper or a thesis, they implicitly or explicitly claim that it is their original work, except for sections which are marked as the work of others. With a thesis for a degree, there may be a form where the candidate confirms this in writing, which brings the law back into the academic sphere. There are many situations in a school or even university context where there is no such claim of originality. Imagine the exam question &quot;what is the third law of thermodynamics?&quot; There would be no need for the student to give a source, because nobody asked for it and nobody could possibly believe that the student just invented that law. If the question was about who discovered the third law, they should say so. Schools which prepare their students for academic work should introduce both concepts and train their students in proper citation at some point. But not too early.
In a hypothetical case like you are describing, you could make a contract with them regarding the duplication of the content, irrespective of copyright law. Their violation of that contract would not necessarily be a copyright violation (which would allow statutory damages), but you might win a breach of contract lawsuit. But if someone took it from them and made copies, you would likely not have a case against that person because copyright would not protect you and you have no contract with them. In addition, you could obtain a very "thin copyright" in a particular new presentation of the material. This would mean that copyright law would apply, but only to the particular presentation (e.g. new footnotes, a particular layout, etc...) If considering doing this IRL, you should consult a copyright attorney.
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.