How can a database derived from copyrighted works be public domain? I've been using the website RefractiveIndex.INFO to get some optical constants for a physics project. It seems like all the graphs reference a book or some source for the data they contain. For example, the most popular one would probably be for water (located here), which references G. M. Hale and M. R. Querry. Optical Constants of Water in the 200-nm to 200-µm Wavelength Region, Appl. Opt. 12, 555-563 (1973). When I read about the database here, the author says that he has released the database to the public domain. How can he do that if the data in this database is not really his own? Also this leaves me unsure exactly how to cite the source. It feels odd to not include the authors of the actual data.
At least in the United States (and I'm pretty sure this is true around the world), facts and information cannot be copyrighted. Just because a work is copyrighted, doesn't mean every part of that work is copyrighted, and factual information conveyed by the work is a part which is not subject to copyright. Copyright on a collection of facts is limited to the selection and arrangement of those facts, and only if that selection and arrangement has some bare minimum amount of originality. See Feist v. Rural, 499 U.S. 340. In this case, it looks at first glance like the person who made that site made their own selection of which materials and which sources would be included; the one place where they really seem to have copied their selection is from glass catalogs with datasheets from specific manufacturers, who would have a hard time arguing that "everything we manufacture in this widely-recognized class of substances" is an original selection. What the author of the website has done is relinquish his rights in his selection and arrangement of the data. In some places, there are other rights besides copyright that do apply to databases; for instance, the EU recognizes database rights to protect significant investment in compiling a database of stuff. But the US does not have that concept. For citing stuff, that's not really a legal question, and has more to do with academic standards. Ask your adviser or teacher if you have one.
The closest that you can come to an official list is the registry maintained by the US copyright office. That tells you which copyrights have been registered, and does not tell you much about items not on the list. But, if a work is registered (and the copyright has not expired, which you can calculate), you know it is not in the public domain. The question is a bit odd, because I don't see how you could ever need to prove legally that a random work is not in the public domain. Copyright is inherent in the act of creating a work and requires no additional actions, under current law. If you know the date of creation of the work, you can figure out whether the work is old enough that its copyright has expired. If you know that the work is &quot;prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties&quot;, you know that it never was protected. These are the main sources of &quot;being in the public domain&quot; under US law, but the law doesn't actually talk about &quot;public domain&quot;, it says when things are or are not protected by copyright. A third source for being &quot;in the public domain&quot; is a &quot;public domain&quot; license, there an author says something sounding like &quot;anybody can use this work as they see fit&quot;. CC0 is one attempt to emulate the concept of &quot;public domain&quot;, by waiving rights and granting permission. Still, the work is protected by copyright if not in one of the two actual public domain categories. Also, under 17 USC 203 such a license can be terminated under certain conditions (during a period between 35 to 40 years after creating the work, approximately).
Can he use another commercial product that is copyrighted, e.g. a map of a location (the map is a political map and has nothing to do with trees), for his tree research purposes, if such a map won't be part of the book he works on? Yes. Copyright protects particular expressions of ideas and knowledge, not the ideas and knowledge themselves. Using a map for research purposes when the map or a modified version of it does not appear in the final work does not make the final work a &quot;derivative work&quot; covered by copyright.
Under Swedish copyright law, a work such as a movie is protected for 70 years after the death of the "creator". It is unclear who the copyright holder is, but it has not been 70 years since the film was made. Unless it was explicitly "released into the public domain", it is still protected, so you can get sued.
A (legal) derivative work has its own independent copyright I'll use the same example Wikipedia does, L.H.O.O.Q.: This is a derivate work of da Vinci's Mona Lisa. It's a legal work because the Mona Lisa was well and truly public domain partly because da Vinci had been dead 401 years but mostly because he died 191 years before the first copyright law was passed. However, it has it's own independent copyright which is still in effect because Marcel Duchamp, it's author only died in 1968. Anyone is free to copy the Mona Lisa. Only people with permission or who meet the exceptions to copyright such as commentary or criticism (as here) can copy L.H.O.O.Q. Of course, there are a lot of potential infringements of Duchamp's copyright out there. However, anyone can also copy any non-original components of a derivative work - like the Mona Lisa parts of L.H.O.O.Q. Your issue If the 1974 book is a derivative work of the 1890 book then it has it's own copyright and you can't copy the book. You can copy anything that is not original, like the text. However, it appears that your assertion is that 1974 book is, in fact, a copy of the 1890 book; if so, then it has no independent copyright as it is not a derivative work. The &quot;title pages and the design on the endsheets&quot; would appear to be independent work.
Recipes themselves are not protectable as intellectual property and a meal made with a recipe is, therefore, not a derivative work (because the meal is not derivative of the particular expression of the recipe which is entitled to protection). The precise expression of a recipe on a printed page is protectable, but that is all. Ideally, you wouldn't read or display the source of the recipe in your video. As the U.S. Copyright Registrar (a division of the Library of Congress) explains: How do I protect my recipe? A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Note that if you have secret ingredients to a recipe that you do not wish to be revealed, you should not submit your recipe for registration, because applications and deposit copies are public records. See Circular 33, Works Not Protected by Copyright. Fashion designs have the same status. This is basically a legacy of a time when cooking and fashion design was done primarily at home by women in their households in the non-monetary economy and upper middle class men who served a judges and legislators didn't consider these ideas significant or economically meaningful enough to warrant legal protection.
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.
As far as I can tell, whenever GitHub redistributes code, it adheres to all of the requirements of the GPL/BSD etc. For example, it never gives away code without including the license text, and it doesn't claim to add unpermitted restrictions to the code. The section you're concerned about is this: That means you're giving us the right to do things like reproduce your content (so we can do things like copy it to our database and make backups); display it (so we can do things like show it to you and other users); modify it (so our server can do things like parse it into a search index); distribute it (so we can do things like share it with other users); and perform it (in case your content is something like music or video). That section isn't worded very precisely, but I understand this to mean they want to reproduce your content in full, not just the code without the license text attached. They want to display your content in full, as you provided it. They want to modify it internally (i.e. they are not redistributing this modified form) in order to allow searching. To the extent that they display code-snippets as search results, that is likely defensible as fair use (search engines are frequently cited as examples of successful fair use defenses). GitHub appears to be acting consistently with the GPL when it reproduces, displays, modifies, and distributes code that you upload. If I'm correct about these facts then nothing that GitHub does with the code goes beyond what the many contributors to a GPL project have explicitly permitted, or what is otherwise permitted by fair use law. If you had some code with a more restrictive license, you might not be able to simultaneously comply with that restrictive license and GitHub's License Grant. Consider the scenario where you have some code that is licensed exclusively to you, and you are not given permission to reproduce or distribute it. In that scenario, the code's license prevents you from agreeing to GitHub's request for a license grant.