Is it legal to copy pictures found on social media and upload them again? I know with other works, as soon as a person creates it, it is automatically copyrighted. So does that mean when a person takes a picture its automatically their property and no one else can do anything but view it? I ask because I'm curious how this effects social media. I'm part of a free running group I found through Meetup.com and they normally take pictures and post them to the Meetup page. I would like to put some pictures on my Facebook but not sure if its allowed. It's not really feasible for me to ask every person in the picture because most of them I don't know!
The default answer is NO, but you would have to check the terms&amp;conditions of Meetup.com. For a simpler example, just look at the bottom of this page: "user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required". That means that you can copy pictures from this site to your Facebook page, if you acknowledge the photographer and link back to here.
You don't seem to be distinguishing properly between "original artwork" and photographs of it. A 19th-century painting will be out of copyright, so you can set up an easel copy it yourself, or even take a photo if the owners don't mind; your copy can be used however you please. However, other people can't use your photograph without your permission. Similarly, if you want to reuse a photograph used in an art book, the important thing is the copyright on the photograph, not the painting.
Not only can’t you trademark it, you can’t use it The original logo is covered by copyright which belongs, prima facie, to the original artist. It doesn’t matter that they are based in Russia; Russia and the US are both signatories to the Berne Convention which means they protect each other’s copyright. That means you can only use it if it is fair use (it isn’t) or if you have the copyright owner’s permission (you don’t). Could I still use the logo I bought and trademark it in the US granted that the seller had made some revisions to the stock photo he found? Not if the seller didn’t have permission to make those changes. Creation of a derivative work is one of the exclusive rights copyright gives. The seller had changed up some parts of the stock image, this includes color scheme, orientation, and made the picture look a little low poly. See above. The original artist of the stock photo is based in Russia and as far as I can see there is no registered copyright on it and don't think they could apply for US copyright anyway. They already have copyright. They would need to register it in the US before they could sue but there is no impediment to them doing so. While I'm not sure where the seller (located in Pakistan) officially downloaded the logo, I had nothing to do with the final design of it or downloaded anything from a stock photo website myself, so I'm not sure if I'd be bounded by any terms of the stock photo website Makes no difference. Just because you didn’t steal the car, that doesn’t make it ok for you to drive it. The stock image is very niche and a bit random. Across all the websites the artist has published it on, it has about 5 or 6 downloads altogether. Not relevant at all. As far the copyright of the seller's work goes, the Fiverr terms state that buyers have all the copyright, though I don't know if this is nullified by the use of the stock image. You can’t sell something you don’t own. If the seller had no right to upload the photo (as it seems they didn’t), the terms of the website don’t matter. The true owner never agreed to those terms and isn’t bound by them.
Exactly the same way it works over all other content There are no special classes of copyright, there’s just copyright. What a user of a service may do with copyright materials will be spelled out in the licence. If there is no licence, then they are left with fair use/fair dealing.
You can do whatever you like with posts made after you change the rules - you have to leave the previous stuff alone. The contributors' have accepted the terms of the licence: They own the copyright or have permission from the copyright holder to post it (the promise) They agree that it can be edited altered or removed CC-BY-SA allows people to copy the stuff off the website and republish it - this is way outside what the contributors agreed to. These people have given permission for their work to be altered but not copied.
The creative commons licenses explicitly include a paragraph that they cannot be revoked once granted. That is an important concept of all free licenses (CC, but also MIT, Apache etc) Now it's a fact that Flickr (and maybe other sites) do allow changing the license to something less permissive. If you use one of their images, it's really best to keep a proof that it once was available under the CC license you originally got it with. This can be e.g., a screenshot or a link to the wayback machine. Wikimedia commons is often affected by this problem, as people regularly upload files from Flickr (which is absolutely ok, if they have a CC-by-sa or similar license at the time of the upload). Commons has installed a review process for such uploads. Trusted users check that the uploaded files really have the license on Flickr that the uploader declared. If later the license on Flickr is changed by the original owner, the history on Commons is considered to be enough evidence that the license was, in fact, permissive earlier. More about this can be read here.
All your work is yours. They've made it very clear it wasn't a work for hire, so it's yours. They can't copyright any of their ideas. You can't copyright an idea. Only specific creative elements authored by them and present in your work could be covered by copyright. You didn't use their block diagrams. I don't see how references to other sites to look at would constitute a creative element they authored. That said, you probably want to talk to a lawyer and get a written legal opinion that you can rely on.
Yes, you can do that, assuming that the pictures are really in the public domain (i.e. due to their age, and not only claimed to be). But you probably shouldn't, but you'll probably want to add a label to the images anyway (what it depicts, who the original painter is, etc). So adding a &quot;public domain&quot; tag to each image shouldn't be a big issue. You can do that on a separate page as well, giving the source for each. Note that while using pd images does not create a copyright violation, even if you blatantly say that you created them yourself, it could still be considered plagiarism. When writing a science book or even a thesis, this could get you into trouble.