How can the title &quot;13&quot; be so common? According to the Wikipedia disambiguation page for 13, there are nineteen albums, four songs, two movies, two novels, a card game, a manga, a musical and a play all titled &quot;13&quot;, not counting stylizations or alternate forms such as &quot;Thirteen&quot;, &quot;13th&quot;, &quot;Number 13&quot; or &quot;XIII&quot;. Wouldn't there be some trademark issues?
You cannot copyright a word or name in and of itself, so you can't sue someone for having a novel titled 13 so long as their novel is distinct from your own. Trademarks can use certain words or word combinations, but often in a way that is stylized or symbolic of a particular unique style and may include font, coloring, and other unique artistic takes. For example, McDonalds cannot copyright or trademark the letter &quot;M&quot; but it can trademark the &quot;Golden Arches&quot; a unique stylized &quot;M&quot; that they use as signage to at all their locations. If the name is a brand of a certain product such, then the name can be trademarked but only with respect to that product. For example, if the Acme Wash-Master is a dish washing machine they can't sue Ace Wash Master, a unique dog bathing system, for using the name &quot;Wash Master&quot; since it's both styled different (Acme uses a dash between words. ACE uses a space) and non-competitive product lines (most people would not wash dishes in a dog bathing device... and one would certainly hope that no dog owners ever said to themselves &quot;Fido stinks and my tub is busted. The dish washer will do in a pinch!&quot;).
Everything except the summary and the cover art are all facts; facts are not subject to copyright. The summary and cover art would be subject to copyright. You may have a fair use defence given that all you are doing is cataloguing the books.
Some jurisdictions do that. Others don't (see, for example, the Dutch national identity card). My New York driver's license is in all caps, and I rather suspect that it's a holdover from the days in which licenses were processed using a computer system that had only upper-case characters. But that's just a guess. The real answer is that the premise of the question is incorrect.
I know that some of this may be covered by either the Creative Commons license or the OGL it was published under, but it's not clear to me how far those freedoms extend. It was all published as materials under copyright to the original authors, TSR, WotC, &amp;c. and if things had been left like that hszmv's answer would've been completely correct: stay vague and allow users to enter those names and descriptions, talk to WotC's lawyers and sales department about license fees, or just keep it to yourself and your friends. You're right, though: WotC went whole-hog, dumped their partial OGL idea, and relicensed some things as Creative Commons. There are different Creative Commons licenses, though, some restricting commercial use that would still keep your app to yourself and friends without a specific licensing agreement. Go find out exactly what WotC put under CC. If it's only the Player's Handbook, then you can only use names and descriptions that are from the Player's Handbook and you're still facing a cease-&amp;-desist if you start adding in Monster Manual info.If it's everything, it's everything they have but still won't include any older modules that they don't have the right to change the copyright status of. It'll still be under copyright, usually until 70 years after the death of the original creator. For Gary Gygax, that'll be 2078. Expect that length to extend during your lifetime though. US copyright usually extends every time Mickey &amp; friends come close to entering the public domain. [Edit: The comments below suggest it might only have been the Systems Reference Document (I assume for 5e). It's 403 pages of not nothing but it's not much given the universe we're talking about. The spell and monster lists are generic. Bigby is nowhere to be found and the only mention of a beholder is a reminder not to use the name beholder without their written approval.] Go find out exactly which CC WotC used. The article above says &quot;all use&quot; but you need to find out the exact number of the Creative Commons license for each thing you're using and make sure all of your uses fall within its terms. Some are basically free use but still insist you mention the copyright holder prominently or in every use. Go ahead and do that if you have to. [Edit: The comments below say it is probably CC 4.0. The SRD download page says you can use CC 4.0 or their own OGL. In both cases, yes, you must acknowledge WotC by name in a way prominent enough to satisfy the license you choose.] And of course, Don't trust legal advice from internet randos or ChatGPT. If this is a serious thing you're going to be spending a good chunk of your life working on or expect to make significant money from, go talk to an actual lawyer. Bonus points for one specialized in IP with a knowledge of roleplaying and the way it's been (partially) opening up lately.If you start off just by talking to WotC's lawyers, just do that somewhere where you get their explanations and permissions in writing. Then keep that somewhere safe in electronic and hard copy. Then still take that with you when you go talk to your own lawyer.
It's not clear to me that your website is, per se, illegal. (Though good luck finding a webhost with a hard drive large enough to store it. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is roughly 38,000 characters. If I've done my calculations correctly, storing all of the strings of this length or shorter would require something like 1053760 GB of storage. Give or take.) The main problem is in distributing the &quot;index&quot; of the string containing the text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This index is just the integer obtained by taking the entire text as a string and treating it as a number in base 26 (A = 1, B = 2, etc.) In other words, all of the information contained in the book is also contained in the index number, and in a relatively simple way. Distributing this number is therefore entirely equivalent to distributing the text; you don't need the website at all. It's entirely analogous to e-mailing the text to someone else; in that process, the text is transformed into a number (in binary, under a different encoding scheme) along the way. But you couldn't seriously argue in a court of law that you were not distributing the text, you were just telling a friend about a very large number. Just to back this up with some actual law citation: US copyright law gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to make and distribute copies of the work. And a &quot;copy&quot; is defined as follows: “Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. In other words, J.K. Rowling (and/or her publishers) have the exclusive rights to distribute that integer, since the work is &quot;fixed&quot; in it by its very nature, and since the work can be reproduced from it.
You would be in poorly-tested waters under US law. The invented name &quot;Cthulhu&quot; as appearing in a novel is not protected by copyright. A collection of invented names and other words assembled into a dictionary (e.g. of Klingon) might be found to constitute a copyright-protected creative work. In Paramount Pictures v. Axanar Productions (complaint), plaintiffs partially base their claim on infringement of language; defendants sought to dismiss the suit on various grounds (&quot;questions of law&quot; rather than questions of fact), but the court denied defendant's motion for summary judgment. Subsequently, defendants settled the case. Constructed languages are highly creative expressive works whose elements are deliberately selected for an artistic purpose, and they are not naturally-occurring facts. The copyright office has no position on copyright protection of a constructed language, and any such position would have to come from so-far non-existent (definitive) case law. The dismissal in Paramount v. Axanar doesn't clearly indicate that a constructed language is protected. The primary legal question would be whether the database that you copy into your system is protected. There is a colorable legal argument that a collection of language-like objects. The statutory language in 17 USC 102 does not specifically preclude protection of a wholely-creative database, and the copyright office does not say whether a conlang can be protected because the courts have not ruled one way or the other. The situation in Feist is very different from the case of a work which invents a language from nothing.
The name can not be copyrighted, but they don't own the rights to the songs and they are telling you they will perform them. They don't want to put it in writing that they are performing songs they legally can't.
A translation is a devivative work - the copyright owner has the exclusive right to these So, yes, translation is prima facie copyright infringement. Strictly speaking, if you translate it, it's a derivative work because you exercised creativity in making the translation; what Google translate does is not a derivative work, it's a copy because there is no creativity. Either way, only the copyright owner can do (or authorise) this. Whether it's legal or not depends on if what you are doing falls within one of the exceptions to the applicable copyright law such as fair use or fair dealing. Attributing the original author does not, of itself, allow translation. Additionally, I'm not able to find the copyright documentation for the site link I provided above. What is "copyright documentation"? Copyright exists the moment a work is created and no further documentation is required. Essentially, I could translate the whole documentation by myself to avoid this problem. No, you can't - see above. If copy-pasting the google translate is illegal, then exactly how much must I edit, move around sentences, change words, and such until the text is no longer plagiarized? All of it. If you were, based on your own knowledge of the software, to write a manual without any copying o the existing manual, that would not be copyright infringement. Is this plagiarism or copyright infringement? It's copyright infringement - plagiarism is an academic misconduct issue not a legal one. where can I check the copyright for the above link? The site you linked has "Copyright © 2020 Acquia, Inc. All Rights Reserved" in the bottom left corner which identifies the copyright holder, the date and prohibits all copying ("all rights reserved"). This isn't necessary but it is helpful. If you really want to do this, contact Acquia, Inc and ask for permission.