Copyright law for an author: Can a word be copyrighted? So, in everything from World of Warcraft to Dungeons and Dragons, even Warhammer and an assortment of other games, both table top and computer based, there's Arcane magic. I've written a few books and, without thinking, I used the term Arcane to be the general name for magic practiced by witches and warlocks and prayer magic used by the clergy. I never thought about it until now, but is Arcane, or Arcane magic, a copyrighted word/phrase/term? To clarify, the spells in my work aren't direct copies of any from those other games, it's simply the usage of what I at first considered a generic word. Could there be trouble down the line? Examples of spells used in my work: Portal magic to move across large distances, "energy beams" for combat purposes, and magical infusion. Not entirely sure if this is the best place for this question, but I'm just wondering if there's any danger of it becoming problem down the line. Also, I apologize if I'm misunderstanding the usage of copyright, but as a relatively new author, I'm trying to make sure I'm not setting myself up for trouble in the future.
No, copyright protection does not exist for single words or even short phrases: see this. A word can be protected, in a certain context, by trademark. To take one example, the word "Apple" is protected in the domain of computer products, because Apple computers has registered "Apple" as their trademark, and you can't then start selling a line of computers named "Apple". You can however sell fruits called "apples", or you could sell knives with that name (unless someone has registered "apple" as a brand of knife). There are currently 45 "classes" for trademark protection. "Arcane" is a normal word of everyday language (YMMV), which means that there is relatively little protection for the word, as contrasted with "Microsoft", a word created by that company. It is unlikely that the courts would recognize "Arcane" as being distinctive. You can search the trademark database here: there is nothing for "arcane magic", and little for "arcane".
Please Note: This was written before the title change of this question and may no longer be applicable According to the Harvard website: In Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. 499 US 340 (1991) the United States Supreme Court held that copyright does not extend to a mere compilation of facts. In this case, it was a telephone directory much the same as the one in ProCD v. Zeidenberg 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996). Furthermore, the Court also ruled that something more than simple "sweat of the brow" labor was required before copyright protection would ensue, with some modicum of authorial originality necessary. Accordingly, it was held in Feist that copyright did not extend to a telephone directory, no matter how laborious a task its compilation was. The decision in ProCD v. Zeidenberg 86 F. 3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996) is highly significant, therefore, in that it permits copyright or quasi-copyright protection to be extended to non-copyrightable material through the use of contract. One would have to consider each meta tag independently. For example, the "description" tag could by copyrightable since it is written for more than just the 'facts', such as a subtle advert for the site that is more than an objective description. However the 'og:type' would not be copyrightable since it would just be considered a fact. Now, if you are using it on another website and sourcing it properly, you could probably use it under "Fair Use" Uses That Are Generally Fair Uses Subject to some general limitations discussed later in this article, the following types of uses are usually deemed fair uses: Criticism and comment -- for example, quoting or excerpting a work in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment. News reporting -- for example, summarizing an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report. Research and scholarship -- for example, quoting a short passage in a scholarly, scientific, or technical work for illustration or clarification of the author's observations. Nonprofit educational uses -- for example, photocopying of limited portions of written works by teachers for classroom use. Parody -- that is, a work that ridicules another, usually well-known, work by imitating it in a comic way. A copyright would exist on the image. One would have to know what license currently applies to the image to know for sure, however, the "Fair Use" to copyright would still apply. With Fair Use, the entity type that uses the image is important. There is much more leniency when a non-profit uses copyrighted information than when the information is used in commercial activity. (With, of course, more exceptions.)
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.
You can't compare a novel and a computer program that way. With a novel, the expression and the essence of the work are the same. With a computer program, while the expression is hard work to create, and often is very original, the essence of the work is what it does. So I can create a totally independent computer program doing the exact same thing, without any copying whatsoever. With your novel, the essence of the work is copied. Unless you change Harry Potter to a pot smoking sanitary engineer, change his wand to a guitar, move him to a different world, where is not surrounded by fellow wizards but by intelligent, speaking animals, and write the whole thing a few years before Mrs. Rowling did.
This a bit dubious. You write &quot;I know you can make a digital copy of a book or CD you own.&quot; but that is true only under limited circumstances. Making such a copy for one's own personal use would likely be fair use (in the US). Selling copies would pretty clearly be copyright infringement. Giving away free copies to significant numbers of people would also be infringement. Temporarily lending copies ro a small number of people might be considered fair use or might not. For the board game, you could allow others to play with the copy you own in person. But COVID makes that unsafe. Assuming the game art is under copyright protection (some older games might have protection expired) selling such images or making them widely available would clearly be infringement. Making them available only during the course of play to a limited group, with technical measures to prevent or discourage copying and no fee charged might pass as fair use, and the game company might well not want to pursue the matter in any case. If you create new art which can be used for the same game, it would be somewhat less likely to be considered infringing/ Even then selling access would probably be trademark infringement, and perhaps infringe the copyright on the rules of the game. There would be legal risk in doing this sort of thing.
Copyright In most (all?) jurisdictions, copyright protects creative expression, not ideas. In united-states doctrine, that is known as the idea-expression distinction, but that concept is not US-specific. Therefore, the text of a recipe, an accompanying image, and other similar elements can be copyrighted. However, the functional parts of the recipe (the exact ingredients, proportions, timing of steps etc.) are not. If the Youtube video reads out the text of the recipe, then it would be a derivative work, but if the script of the video is rewritten in different words, it is not. Even further, the creative elements are only protected insofar as the same underlying idea can be expressed in multiple ways (merger doctrine). The typical example is software code where the level of similarity required to show infringement is high: computer code is text, but that text has to follow strict rules to be valid when run through the computer, and industry best practices mandate additional similarities. Recipes are more flexible than computer code, but they still follow a guiding pattern. Similarities of content that would be considered close paraphrasing (hence infringement) in a free-form context could be deemed to not be infringement in a stricter-form context. For instance, in france, taking the recipes from a children’s cookbook and putting them into another children’s cookbook (in different words but the same &quot;for-children&quot; tone) was deemed to not be infringement: Ces recettes prennent la forme classique et stéréotypée d’une énumération des ingrédients puis d’une description étape par étape des opérations à effectuer. Si (...) la formulation prend en considération le jeune public auquel est destiné ces recettes, cette caractéristique qui n’est au demeurant pas innovante comme le montrent d’autres exemples de recettes destinées aux enfants versés au débat par la défenderesse qui adoptent un ton similaire, ne suffit pas à leur donner une forme ou un contenu qui porte l’empreinte de la personnalité du rédacteur. Aussi les recettes en cause ne relèvent pas d’une activité créatrice originale, et ne sont pas de ce fait protégées au titre des droits d’auteurs. Those recipes take the standard and stereotyped form of a list of ingredients followed by a step-by-step description of the operations to perform. If (...) the choice of words takes its young audience into consideration, that characteristic (which is not new, as proven by other examples of children-oriented recipes shown by the defendant) is not sufficient to give it a form or content bearing the mark of its creator’s personality. As such, those recipes are not considered an original creative work, and are thus not protected by copyright. Source: TGI PARIS 3ème 2ème section 24 janvier 2014 RG 12/00188, cited at this link. Other intellectual property rights Trademarks protect brand image. If John Doe publishes John Doe’s Recipe Book with a recipe for John Doe’s cookies, and fills out the appropriate trademark paperwork, you are allowed to follow the same recipe to make cookies (or another recipe that produces similar cookies), but you cannot sell them as &quot;John Doe’s cookies&quot;. You can say that you followed the recipe of John Doe’s book, but you can not say or imply anything that could make anyone think John Doe approved your cookies. Patents protect inventions, which are novel and non-obvious solutions to (usually technical) problems. I am not familiar enough to know if a particularly inventive recipe could be patentable (I guess not, but the answer might vary across jurisdictions). However, most recipes are new takes on old ideas (add more of that ingredient, less of that, have a different texture etc.). Those are certainly not patentable because they are &quot;obvious&quot; (which, in the context of patent law, means that anyone who has read all existing cookbooks in all languages could imagine the modified recipe). There are other, highly jurisdiction-dependent rights. For instance, in france, the shape and presentation of John Doe’s cookies could be protected under a &quot;dessins et modèles&quot; (sketches and models) clause. (For most recipes, it is trivial to modify the appearance of the final product enough to escape that kind of protection, so it is best thought of as an extension of trademark - you cannot sell John-Doe-looking-cookies even if you make clear they are not John-Doe-approved.)
united-states Names and short phrases are not subject to copyright protection. A list of such phrases is probably not protectable either. Game mechanics are not protectable either. While short phrases can be protected as trademarks, they can be so protected only if they are used to identify a product or service, or to advertise that product or service. Terms used within the game are not normally subject to trademark protection. Even if such a term did have trademark protection, using it within the game would not be using it &quot;in commerce&quot; or &quot;in trade&quot;, that is to identify or market the game. A brand name, a slogan, or a logo are typical trademarks, the name of a thing within the product is not. In short, a list of character classes would not, in the US at least, infringe copyright or trademark protections on another game.
There is no fixed legal meaning to &quot;non-commercial&quot;, instead, every license must define what is meant by &quot;non-commercial&quot;, if it uses that term. CC BY-NC 4.0 says that NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For purposes of this Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange. That would mean that you cannot sell software of a dataset so licensed, but you could give it away. Copyright does not prohibit using a work as raw data for some kind of analysis, such as counting occurrences of words, so it is legal to publish a table of word-counts from the Harry Potter novels, even though you can't publish the novels without permission. The word counts are facts, not &quot;expression&quot;, and copyright doesn't protect facts. It is possible that your initial access to the expressive work was contingent on not doing something with that work, for example a license to copy a book in the first place might be contingent on you not using the data for purposes of statistical analysis. For Harry Potter books, there's really no way to show that Smith could only have gained access to the work by agreeing to a certain license and showing that Smith did agree (Potter books are everywhere). It is possible that some work is so well controlled that you did indeed agree to &quot;not subject the work to statistical analysis&quot;. It is highly unlikely that there is any such condition is attached to a work that has is &quot;non-commercially&quot; licensed. You can read the license and see what it actually says. Basically, an abstract model of X is not X itself, it is a fact about X, and facts are not protected.