Can fictional abilities of a character be protected by copyright? Some examples of abilities from games: In Dota 2, the hero Queen of Pain has a ability/skill called Scream of Pain. It is essentially a kind of &quot;magical&quot; scream that damages nearby enemies. In the Warcraft universe the so called &quot;night elves&quot; have an ability called shadowmeld that makes them invisible, leaving only the shadows. Are abilities like these protected by copyright? Also, there are any court cases regarding this?
Your example powers are tropes and their basis in public domain The Queen of Pain's scream is modeled after the Banshee, which had a scream that would kill... and there are LOTS of variants of Banshee. In fact, &quot;Our Banshees Are Louder&quot; is a trope. Hiding in a shadow or walking through it is for example a typical feature of Ninja stories since the Edo Period, and a common Trope as &quot;Shadow walker&quot;. That makes those two powers older than You can not have a copyright on concepts, facts, or ideas. Facts are not copyrightable, which was decided LONG ago over Feist v Rural. Neither can you copyright concepts or ideas. You won't get a claim on the concept of a damaging scream or turning into shadow. See also Copyright.gov (emphasis mine): How do I protect my idea? Copyright does not protect ideas, concepts, systems, or methods of doing something. You may express your ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in your description, but be aware that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in your written or artistic work.
In my opinion, you are totally free to publish the information. There are two areas of law that can be cosidered - private and public law. In the private law area, you can be liable for revealing trade secrets, but only if you agreed to keep them by a contract. Trade secrets do not exist by themselves (there are minor exceptions, eg. in competition law, but those do not concern us), they must be protected by contracts. Another private limitations, like libel laws, won't apply here. This is not uncommon, but not in cars - you can find clauses like these in software license agreements. Then there is the public area. Is there any regulation, any policy of the state, that prevents you from publishing it? I am not aware you whole legal code of your state, but I doubt there is. It would be a harsh limitation of freedom of speech. Even if the modification could lead to illegal effect (like, modifying toy weapon to kill by rising its power...) it would be only illegal under very rare circumstances. To conclude it - freedom of speech can be limited only if there is sufficient public interest to do so, and I don't see any.
We cannot and will not try to answer &quot;what should i do?&quot; questions here. Nothing in the linked page makes me think that the views expressed in the previous question here are any less correct. They certainly have not changed the law on copyright. The linked page is an open forum. Many of the posts o9n that thread express ill-informed and incorrect views of how copyright works, and what it protects. Several google searchs find no trace of the suit described in the thread. Note that in US law no copyright claim may be heard in a small claims court, except for the federal copyright office's small claims tribunal. I am not sure if the same is true in Canada, but it might be that the suit was simply dismissed on such a basis. In any case small claims cases do not establish legal precedents in Canada or the US. Of course it is true that anyone can sue over almost anything, even when there is no valid legal basis for the suit. If the suit had been won by the claimant, or even settled that would be larger grounds for worry. A person seriously worried over publishing a book such as that described in the question might do well to consult a lawyer with relevant expertise. A single consultation plus an opinion letter might not cost very much. But 17 USC 102 (b) is very clear that copyright never protects facts, as are the copyright laws of other countries. Note that reports of the events of sports matches are not protected by copyright, although expressive language and analysis may be. 17 USC 102 (b) reads: (b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. Article 2 paragraph (8) of the Berne Copyright Convention provides that: (8) The protection of this Convention shall not apply to news of the day or to miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press information. There seems little room for copyright protection of the moves of chess games.
You should probably look up the Open Gaming Liscense (OGL) and what you can or cannot do with respect to it. Generally, classic fantasy monsters (Dragons, Manticores, Sasquatch, Vampires). Are fair use. OGL also allows for creatures that are similar to D&amp;D exclusive monsters to exist so long as the name is changed sufficently. Most &quot;monsters&quot; are in what's called Public Domain and are free to use and modify. Additionally &quot;powers&quot; of a monster (or superhero) aren't generally copyrighted but the totatllity of their use in a work can be (does your superhero fly? Is super-strong? Is invulerable? Can be fine. Is he named Clark Kent? That's a problem). Fair Use also allows for some parody but again, it's a defense to copyright infringment and not a liscenses to take someone elses work wholesale. It also doesn't stop them from suing you, as you have to claim fair use as your defense if and when each suit arises. I'd recomend looking at National Comics Publications, Inc. v. Fawcett Publications, Inc. for an example of an intellectual property dispute that is close to yours. Note that Fawcett won at trial but lost on appeal and rather than take the matter before SCOTUS decided to settle out of court.
To my understanding, the answer is in theory no, in practice yes. Ordinarily, non-infringing derivatives gain copyright on the creative elements contributed by that derivative's author (17 USC 103(b)). However, as I cover here, the United States has a specific statutory provision in 17 U.S.C 103(a) which bars infringing derivatives from gaining copyright (internationally, most statutes are silent on this specific scenario). So in theory, Disney does not own copyright on the derivative because no one does - no copyright was assigned to the derivative author due to its infringing nature and the elements original to that derivative are technically in the public domain (unless they are far enough removed from the original, per the wording of s. 103(a)). However, in practice Disney effectively owns the copyright. By definition of being a derivative, it contains original elements of another author's work. Disney is the rightsholder of that author's work and as such can effectively exercise the rights granted to it by copyright law on the derivative by virtue of holding the underlying original's copyright.
Per a decision of the US Copyright Office last month, AI generated images are not subject to copyright. That means you can use the generated images for any purpose you want1, but so can anyone else. However, the specific usage of a given image might be protected - so if you put a caption on the image and arrange it in the form of a comic (as the artist in that example did), that specific text and arrangement can be protected, but the underlying image can't be. Laws may differ elsewhere in the world, but that's the current stance in the US. 1 Subject to any appropriate laws, including any copyright laws which the new image itself may violate. Just because the image isn't protected itself doesn't mean that it can't infringe on someone else's copyrights. See the other answer for more details.
Of course. Copyright law prevents you from making copies, and prevents others from making copies. It doesn’t oblige you to take extreme precautions against vague possibilities that others might break the law. And reading is not considered “copying”. So you don’t have to prevent others from reading your books at all.
Copyright never protects ideas as such, whether in movies, novels or text books or any other kind of work. However, if an aspect of work, such as a character, place or fictional society are sufficiently distinctive, and if another work uses that aspect, with detailed similarity to the previous work, it might be found to be a derivative work of the original. A derivative work requires permission from the copyright holder of the original work. For example, in Ursula K. LeGuin's famous SF novel The Left Hand of Darkness a fictional race or species, the Gethenians, is portrayed which is neither male nor female most of the time, but becomes sexually active and gendered a few days a month, and an individual may be male one month and female the next. This is an original and distinctive idea. Another author could create a different group of people with a similar nature without infringing copyright, but if the detailed description of how the process worked, or how it felt to the individuals involved was similar, that might make it a derivative work, and LeGuin's estate might be able to sue and win. This is something that gets decided on a case-by-case basis, and such decisions are highly fact-based. But if the new work has a society or species which is clearly different from any previously invented one, even though it shares some aspect, and if there is no detailed, point-by-point similarity, an infringement suit seems unlikely. Several SF authors have said &quot;Its not the idea, it's what you do with it that matters.&quot; Filmmakers, because of the money involved, tend to be more cautious than book authors. For example, Paramount bought rights to the &quot;flat cats&quot; from Robert A. Heinlein before filming the Star Trek episode &quot;The Trouble with the Tribbles&quot;, although the similarity was quite probably not enough for a successful infringement suit (but no one will ever know for sure, since they bought permission). This is described in some detail in David Gerrold's book about the making of that episode. Gerrold wrote that his conscious model was the importation of rabbits into Australia, not RAH's flat cats, but there are some similarities, and DG had read The Rolling Stone (where the flat cats appear) years before. In any specific case. consulting a lawyer with expertise in the area would be a good idea, as the details will matter.