Do countries that are not members of the Berne Convention still enjoy the benefits it provides? The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, is an international agreement governing copyright, which was first accepted in Berne, Switzerland, in 1886. Although widely recognized around the world, there are still some countries that are not signatories to the Berne Convention. For example: Palestine, Somalia, Iran, Iraq, etc. What would happen if an Iranian artist or designer's work is plagiarized by an American company, would they still be protected by the Berne Convention? What if the aforementioned creative individual later moves to a country that is a member of the Berne Convention? Would there be retrospective application?
No The Berne Convention requires member states to afford copyright protection equal to their own to works from other member states. A work first published only in non-member state(s) and by citizen(s) of non-member state(s) is not required to be given such protection but such protection is not prohibited either. A work can not acquire copyright retrospectively if it didn’t have it on creation.
Depending on your jurisdiction, such lists may be protected, but not by copyright. For example, in Germany there was a court decision that scanning all the country’s phone books and selling them on CD constituted “unfair competition” and was illegal, while hiring 1000 typists who would manually type in all this information would not be. Databases are protected in many jurisdictions, and a list of the 1000 most commonly used English words could reasonably be called a database.
copyright will cover the names and graphics of games The names of games are not protected by copyright, nor by patent. The names could be protected by trademark. Note that trademarks are specific to a country: what is trademarked in one country may well not be in another. Almost all countries have a way to search their trademark registries, often online. However in some countries, including the US, use of a name in commerce will confer some protection even without registration. What will be considered a &quot;mechanic&quot;? for example MTG have specific mana system, if someone will be creating a game with same idea but will refer to it with other names such as &quot;Ember&quot; instead of &quot;Fire&quot; will it violate the patent? Game mechanics are not protected by copyright. This includes all the procedures and rules of the game. The text used to express those rules may be protected, but often it is not if it is the most obvious way to describe the mechanics. For example, in chess there are different pieces with different moves. That could not be protected by copyright, even if chess were a new game. In bridge the winner of each trick leads to the next. That could not be protected by copyright either, even if bridge were a new game (and contact bridge is just new enough that it could in theory be under copyright still). How do i know if certain patents are applied and when they expire? Most games are not protected by patent, but some are. Patents, like trademarks, are specific to a country. Each country has a way to search its list of active patents. Note that patents have a strict tiem limit, and they normally cannot be extended or renewed. I believe that the limit of a patent is currently 20 years in most countries. (It used to be 17 years in the US.) If a game is patented in Country X and someone is printing the same game but with different art and names in country Y, will the one who print in country Y could be exposed to a lawsuit? Unless the game is also patented in country Y, there will be no grounds for an infringement lawsuit inn Y. But importing the game into X may be patent infringement, and could expose the importer to a suit.
Yes Such a work might well still be protected by copyright after 50 years. The time that copyright protection will remain in force depends on the country where the work was created (normally where the author was living). In some countries it will also depend on when the creation occurred. In many countries such protection lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. Under US law recent works use the &quot;life of the author+70 years&quot; rule. Works created before 1978 may be protected for 95 or 120 years after creation, depending on the circumstances. See This well-known chart for details. If the work is protected by copyright, preparing a new derivative work, or performing or distributing the original or a derivative work are all copyright infringement, and the owner could sue. This is true whether a fee is charged or the work is performed or distributed for free. Exploiting the work for commercial profit might increase the amount of damages available, however. If the author has not published or exploited the work for 50 years or more, the author might not choose to sue, but that is entirely the author's decision. The author would have the right to sue, and given the facts as described in the question, to collect some damages. There is not enough information in the question to guess how large the damages could be. In the US 17 USC 504 provides for statutory damages, which the court has significant discretion on the amount of, with no proof of economic loss. Specifically this law says: (c) Statutory Damages.— (1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work. (2) In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000. In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200. The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords; or (ii) a public broadcasting entity which or a person who, as a regular part of the nonprofit activities of a public broadcasting entity (as defined in section 118(f )) infringed by performing a published nondramatic literary work or by reproducing a transmission program embodying a performance of such a work. In short, the mere lapse of 50 years does not make the unpublished musical work free for use without permission.
Details depend on the juristiction. For that, consult a lawyer if you plan to publish your app anywhere. But generally, even simple texts from exercises can be covered by copyright. Compare song lyrics, which are not much longer (and might not involve more creative thought than a good exercise ...). For vocabulary lists, it gets more tricky, but those can be covered as well if the assembly of the list was a creative effort. So if you simply list the 1,000 most common worlds in English and their translation, you are possibly fine, but if the words are divided into units and lessons, that's creative work.
A book (or any other creative work) published in the 1800s is now in the public domain everywhere in the world (excepting odd cases like Peter Pan where a special rule applies in some jurisdictions.) Anyone may legally quote from such a work at any length with no legal requirement for permission. In fact there is no legal requirement to attribute the quote to the author (although there is an ethical requirement). In fact one may publish a new edition of such a work, unchanged or modified in any way one chooses, with no legal need to obtain permission from anyone or to pay any royalties or fees. If the work were recent enough to still be protected by copyright, a limited quote could be used under fair use, fair dealing or another exception to copyright under the laws of most countries. The exact rules vary by country, and are often highly fact-dependent, so the exact details will matter. If one wanted to quote enough from a recent work that permission is required, the copyright holder, who is often not the publisher, would need to grant permission. That is often the author or the author's heir, but it can be a person or firm to which the author transferred the rights. Sometimes the rights-holder can be hard to identify. Update: it would be possible for a work published in, say, 1890 by an author then young who lived to a fairly old age, dying in, say 1960, to still be protected in some countries, although not in the US. (Anything published before 1925 is now PD in the US.) But Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, and all of her work has long been in the public domain
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in effect since 1976 and currently signed by about 179 countries, has in Article 12 Paragraph 4: No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country. It's not absolute, as it would allow for a person to be deprived of that right if it weren't &quot;arbitrary&quot;. But it's the strongest statement I've found so far.
There is no internationally-enforceable mechanism regarding how other people call something, or what alphabet can be uses to write a word. I can legally call that country between Bangladesh and Thailand "Burma" or "Myanmar", I can call Україна Ukraine, The Ukraine, or Ukrainia (the latter seems to be old-fashioned, but it's still legal). As a diplomatic matter, the US government seems to have settled on certain designations so that it uses the version "Myanmar" for official purposes although it includes "(Burma)" in popular communications (State Department travel advisories). If it wanted to, the US could call The Republic of North Macedonia by the name "Macedonia", though there would be political protests. The EU, NATO, UN etc. can likewise set its own rules regarding names of countries. There are many additional complications in the case of countries that are not universally / widely recognized, such as Trasnistria and the Republic of Somaliland. If the president of the Republic of Somaliland sought to address the UN, his problem would not be what people would call his country, it is that the Republic of Somaliland is not "recognized" by the UN (it has no official status), or anyone else. The question of "sameness" of language is a prominent feature of nationalist movements. Claims are made that Flemish and Dutch are "the same" or "different", likewise Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin; Dari, Farsi and Tajik. Thus there is no real chance of litigating the matter of whether Moldovan and Romanian are the "same language" and which name should be used. But if the EU parliament wants to, it could rule that the language of Moldova is to be called "Romanian", or "Moldovan".