Data copyright for public domain content or natural resources So fossil websites such as this, this, and this all say their data is basically it is for personal or educational use not-for-profit. Others such as this are creative commons. From my understanding, on one hand, you can't "copyright" something that is recorded (I read that somewhere). You can't copyright a record of the rainfall statistics, or a collection of phone numbers or addresses in a phone book. I am not sure why exactly, but it sort of makes sense. This data is part of "nature", it is "public". The same with stuff like fossils. They grew out of nature and so are part of the public. But hmm, maybe if they were found on private property (someones private land), maybe then they would be considered not public, not sure. But it makes sense to me that fossils or records of phone numbers aren't copyrightable because they are public / natural data. Which makes me wonder about "data". If someone has data in a database about natural stuff, like the data at the above fossil sites (images of fossils, or metadata of fossils such as this), then that is still technically something from nature. That is, it is public information / a public resource. But then maybe not. A website that tracks user behavior, that data is private. But that would make sense because the website is like a business with private access and which they own the transactions. So that just gets me more confused. Also, I know photographers stuff is protected under copyright, even though it is of nature. But maybe there is a boundary between "documentation photos" and "creative photos". This may be why the museums can limit the use of their photos to personal/educational use. So to summarize, I'm wondering a few things: If database records (just the metadata part) of natural resources can by copyrighted. If the use of database records (metadata) of natural resources can be limited in scope by a provider (not sure if this is the same thing as copyright). Same for the images. Basically just would like to understand better what data can and can't be copyrighted to prevent certain uses. A related example is digitizing a public domain book. The book content is public domain. But if someone hosts a digitized book (that is, an image of the content), I wonder if they can say "you can only use this for personal use". Or if they go one step further than just pasting an image online of a public domain work (like archive.org does), and instead post the unicode textual data of the book, if that can be copyrighted (that is, if they can say "you can only use this for personal use"). By textual form I mean, more than just a PDF/image of the book, but something you can actually copy-paste into a Word document or text editor. So we know the content is public domain. Then in the case of archive.org we know the images of the content are public domain. Next to know is if the text that was taken out of the image and put into a text document is public domain. The reason is because technically it does require technology/work to create the artifact at each step ($10,000 digitizing tools to digitize books at scale, or complicated/private OCR technology for getting the text from the images, or the work of manually entering in the text by looking at the image or book directly).
Copyright protects literary and artistic expression, not facts. So, in a database, the structure of the tables, the construction of the queries and the presentation of the user interface are all subject to copyright. The data stored in each record is not subject to copyright if it is a fact but is subject if it is a literary or artistic work. For example, in the IMDb database, the name of a film, the year it was made, the director’s name, the actors’ names etc. are not copyright, however, the star ratings, the reviews, the table structure, the queries and the user interface all are. For your fossil example, the fossil, where it was found, who found it, when etc. are all non-copyrightable facts. Any photographs of it, drawings of it or scientific writing about it are all copyright because they all involve creative transformation of the fossil. That creativity is key. For the book, if the scanning is automated and the text is generated by OCR then there is no new copyright. If a human makes editing or compositional choices, there is.
"Public domain" refers to things in principle copyrightable but where protection has lapsed, been repudiated, or is a statutory exception (such as government works). A website is not "in the public domain". The idea that a website is "public property" is (*cough*) mistaken. There are basically two ways in which a web interaction could be illegal. The first regards whether accessing another person's computer is illegally accessing a computer, which is a crime. Authorization essentially comes down to "permission": if the owner permits me to access the computer, I am authorized. Putting stuff out there on a web server is an open-ended grant of permission to look at a web page. That simply means that if I create a web page (with a bunch of links or not), I am granting you permission to interact with my computer to that extent. It does not create permission to hack into a password-protected subdirectory. An ordinary web crawler automates what a clicking human does. Copyright law is also relevant, in that the stuff I put on my webpage is not to be copied without permission. Any webpage access necessarily involves automatic copying from machine to machine: in putting stuff out there for the world to see, I am saying that the world can do that level of automatic copying that arises from normal html-and-click interactions. It does not mean that you can download and do stuff with my copyrighted content (i.e., it is not an abandonment of copyright: I did not put that stuff in the public domain). Putting a web page out there in an unrestricted fashion means that you've given a certain level of permission to "copy" (at least in the automatic server-to-browser viewing sense). I may want to impose conditions on peoples' access to my stuff, so I can impose terms on such material. For instance, I may require users to agree to certain conditions before accessing the CoolStuff subdirectory. Users then have to jump through a minor hoop and agree to those terms. In that case, my permission is conditional, and if you violate the terms of that agreement, I may be able to sue you for copyright infringement. It could then be a violation of my terms of service (TOS) if I say "you may not crawl my website" (in less vague language). A TOS gets its legal power from copyright law, because every webpage interaction involves copying (I assume that technical point is obvious), and copying can only be done with permission. You may technologically overcome my weak click-through technology so that the bot just says "sure whatever" and proceeds to illegally use my web page: I can sue you now for copyright infringement. The robot-specific methods of meta-tags and robots.txt have no legal force. Although there is a way to say "no you may not," which is tailored to automated access, the meaning and enforcement of these devices has not yet reached the law. If my page uses NOFOLLOW and your program doesn't know or care, you (your program) do not (yet) have a duty to understand, detect and respect that tag. Prior registration is also not a legal requirement, and very many pages that are on the master crawl list get there from being linked to by someone else's web page. Again, there is at present no legal requirement of pre-registration (and there is no effective mechanism for verifying that the site owner has registered the site). Archiving and especially re-displaying someone's content is, on the other hand, not legal. It would be plainly copyright infringement if you were to scoop up someone else's webpage and host it. You can analyze their material and somehow associate it with some search terms, and display a link to that page, but you cannot copy and republish their material. You can put very short snippets out there taken from a web page, under the "fair use" doctrine, but you can't wholesale republish a webpage. (It should be noted that the archive.org is an internationally recognized library, and libraries have extra statutory powers to archive).
Am I correct to infer that content/data created by a US city have an open license (public domain if created by US city employees or open license if created by a contractor)? No. For example, Larimer County, Colorado created election administration software in-house rather than using an outside contractor to do so, and it would be lawful for it to license that software to other governments in a manner that helps recover its development costs. There is an issue over whether a city or state can copyright its municipal ordinances or statutes or regulations in a legally enforceable way when people have a legal duty to comply with them. Some courts have held that state statutes that are binding upon people can't be protected in that manner. Efforts of the West Corporation to protect its page numbering system that was widely used by courts to refer to public domain case opinions were mostly invalidated in litigation. An open question is that most municipal governments incorporate by reference in their ordinances Uniform Building Codes that are subject to private copyrights and are not terribly cheap to obtain copies of. Yet, every person doing construction work is bound to follow the enacted ordinance including the parts incorporated by reference.
Unless the work has entered the public domain (after the copyright expires, or if a copyright notice or renewal was omitted when these were required, or in other ways) there is always an owner of the copyright. If the copyright was retained by the author, who has died, than the author's heir(s) own it. (If there are no other heirs, it becomes the property of the state. This is known as escheating.) If the author has sold or assigned the copyright (say to a publisher) then the buyer or assignee owns it. If the owner is a business that has ceased to operate, but has not sold the copyright, then the shareholders or proprietor has the right to sell or license it (technically the business still owns it). If the business goes through legal bankruptcy, the copyright would be sold, possibly as a part of "and all its other assets and good will", or else would escheat to the state. It can be hard to find the copyright to a work long unpublished. The original author may have died, and the author's heirs may be hard to track. The copyright may have been sold, and the sale may not have been properly recorded. In the US, the Copyright Office maintains records that try to identify the copyright owner of all registered copyrights. The office will search these, for a fee, but there is not always a correct or useful answer. Under current US law, if one cannot find the correct owner of a copyright, and secure permission to use it, one is simply out of luck (except for musing, where a compulsory license is available for some uses at a government-specified fee). Any use is then infringement (unless it is a fair use) and the owner could always turn up and sue. The term "orphan works" has been applied to works whose copyright owner is unknown and hard to find. The same term is also applied to works whose copyright holder is known, but which are long out of print and unlikely to be reprinted, particularly when there is no paying market for them. In the US, there have been several proposals for dealing with "orphan works" by granting a compulsory licensee for them, or by declaring them to be in the public domain, or by taxing them and declaring them to be PD if he tax goes unpaid. None of these have been passed into law in the US, nor have similar proposals been made law in any other country that I know of. (declaring Orphan works PD might cause a problem under the Berne Convention.) To be honest, as there is little economic value in orphan works, no one will spend much money or energy in lobbying for such a law, and the industries that make their money via copyright (music and film in particular) are often suspicious of and automatically oppose anything that weakens copyright in any way, or seems to. In any case, no such law has yet passed. (Edit I now learn that Canada and the EU have laws giving access to orphan works under some circumstances, and other countries may have such laws.) It is true that the owner of the copyright on an orphan work may well be unlikely to sue for infringement of that copyright. The owner may not even know that s/he owns the copyright. But a user could never by fully safe, because the owner (or a new owner after a transfer) could always choose to sue for any continuing infringement, and any past one if the statute of limitations has not run out. This answer is largely based on knowledge of US law, but I believe that this situation is basically the same in most countries.
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.
This may well be infringement, but I agree that you should start by reaching out to the instructor. You don't want to pay a lawyer if the matter can be be adjusted peacefully. In the US there is a special limited exemption to copyright for "use in classroom instruction" which might apply in such a case. I am not sure if there is a similar provision in Canadian copyright law. But the instructor is likely to change his practice if you notify him of your objection, even if he has the technical right to use the photo. At least it is worth finding out. If he won't, then you can always consult a lawyer.
You seem to assume that copyrights require paperwork such as registration. This is wrong, copyright is automatic. And it prevents the downloader from making the sort of change that you suggest. In fact, it prevents the downloader from using your template at all. The only reason the downloader can use that template is because you've granted him a specific license to ignore some copyright rules, but the default remains. And you did not grant the right to alter the template to free users.
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.