Section 107 and 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act I have seen an book Chemistry Essential for Dummies on web which says that No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act Is it legal to download this book under the sections 107 or 108 of the Copyright Law?.I couldn't understand the sections since it's too lengthy and hard to interpret.Could anyone explain it in simple words.
Section 108(a) is the most useful for an infringer who posts an entire copy of a protected work in public. Subsections(b,c) require that the copy not be made available outside the premises, which precludes internet posting; (d) requires a user request to make a copy; (e) applies only to items that are off the market and transferred to a specific user; (h) allows more copying in the last 20 years of the period when a work is protected (not applicable here). Subsection (a) allows a library or archive to make one copy of a work, as long as there is no commercial advantage to making the copy, the library is relatively public (it might restrict access to bona fide researchers), and a copyright notice is included: this has the fewest restrictions on copying. The internet downloader is not a library or an archive, so the downloader is not granted any permission under 108 to make a copy. Under 108(a) a library can make no more than one copy available, but every uploading or downloading is "making a copy". A library would be contributorily liable for the illegal downloadings of their "customers". It is difficult to know exactly what one can get away with under 17 USC 107 a.k.a. "fair use". I am fairly sure that posting a copy of a contemporary book in the open is not "fair use" even if the intent is to make it possible for dummies to study chemistry: such copying is not at all transformative, totally unlimited, and provides a significant market substitute for the protected work.
Copyright law treats computer files containing text as &quot;copies&quot; and computer files containing sound as &quot;phonorecords&quot;. Indeed it must, otherwise there would be no copyright protection for ebooks and for downloadable music. Thus, I would take 17 U.S. Code §121 to apply. The word &quot;material&quot; in copyright law has been held to include &quot;stored in electronic form on any storage device&quot; so that the key requirement for an initial copyright, that the work be &quot;fixed in a tangible form&quot; or &quot;fixed in any tangible medium of expression&quot; is satisfied by a computer file, see 17 USC 102 17 USC 121 reads: it is not an infringement of copyright for an authorized entity to reproduce or to distribute in the United States copies or phonorecords of a previously published literary work ... if such copies or phonorecords are reproduced or distributed in accessible formats exclusively for use by eligible persons. Note that the page &quot;Copyright and Digital Files&quot; describes computer files recorded in a computer or on disk as &quot;copies&quot; as in deed does 17 USC 117 This establishes that such files are copies, and thus consist of &quot;materiel objects&quot;. The official US copyright office page on &quot;Can I Use Someone Else's Work? Can Someone Else Use Mine?&quot; reads: Whether or not a particular work is being made available under the authority of the copyright owner is a question of fact. But since any original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium (including a computer file) is protected by federal copyright law upon creation, in the absence of clear information to the contrary, most works may be assumed to be protected by federal copyright law. (emphasis added) Copyright Office Circular 1: &quot;Copyright Basics&quot; reads: A work is “fixed” when it is captured (either by or under the authority of an author) in a sufficiently permanent medium such that the work can be perceived, reproduced, or communicated for more than a short time. A computer file is petty clearly &quot;sufficiently permanent&quot; for this purpose. Also consider Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc 886 F. 3d 1179 As this web page reports: In a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that Google's use of Oracle's software code in developing the Android operating system constituted a fair use under §107 of the Copyright Act. The use would not have been fair use unless the code was protected by copyright, and the code almost surely existed only in the form of computer files. Thus the US Supreme Court has treated computer files as &quot;materiel objects&quot; for purposes of copyright law. (Note also that the use was declared to be infringement unless fair use applied, which leads even more directly to the same conclusion.)
First, the seller has not violated copyright law by selling you this book. Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley &amp; Sons, Inc. provides the precedent. The Supreme Court ruled that the First Sale doctrine applies to &quot;grey market&quot; imports of books, so buying a book cheaply in another country and then shipping it to the USA is entirely legal, regardless of what the publisher would like. The court wrote: Putting section numbers to the side, we ask whether the “first sale” doctrine applies to protect a buyer or other lawful owner of a copy (of a copyrighted work) lawfully manufactured abroad. Can that buyer bring that copy into the United States (and sell it or give it away) without obtaining permission to do so from the copyright owner? Can, for example, someone who purchases, say at a used bookstore, a book printed abroad subsequently resell it without the copyright owner’s permission? In our view, the answers to these questions are, yes. Wikipedia also has an article on the case. As for your recourse against the seller, this would seem to be very limited unless they specifically promised you the US edition, or the content is materially different between US and Indian editions. You don't say what kind of book this is. Textbooks typically have identical content. Fiction and other entertainment books generally have local idioms and terminology changed (e.g. &quot;pavement&quot; versus &quot;sidewalk&quot;) but will otherwise be the same. You might be able to claim that this is a material difference, but its likely to be difficult.
US law simply prohibits copying, not possession of a pixel. If you copy 90% of a work, you are still copying, infringing on the creators exclusive right. Same is true if you copy 20%, and so on. The pertinent first question is, how do the courts decide if there has been copying? This is a factual matter decided on the basis of preponderance of evidence. Defense will argue, very persuasively, that it is more likely that the presence of an identical pixel in two works is purely coincidental (likewise, the appearance of the word &quot;is&quot; in two texts is purely coincidental&quot;). We can imagine future technology with megabyte pixels, where the particular &quot;white&quot; pixel is unique to the original work, and no reasonable fact-finder could hold that the later word accidentally stumbled onto exactly that pixel. The second thing that has to be established is that the degree of copying &quot;matters&quot;, starting with Perris v. Hexamer, so that to be infringing, the degree of copying must be more than minimal. Courts have long relied on the notion of &quot;substantial similarity&quot;, where you know it when you see it, that is, ordinary observation would cause it to be recognized as having been taken from another work. There is no bright line drawn by Congress of SCOTUS regarding how much copying is &quot;material&quot;. It is extremely unlikely that a reasonable line could be drawn that would render single-pixel copying &quot;material&quot;.
Copyright law regulates copying of protected material. In the US, there are no laws that specifically prohibit reading anything. It may be illegal to be in possession of something (classified material), but if it is legal to be in possession, it is legal to read. (Do not confuse "read" with "read aloud to an audience" a.k.a. perform, which is a separate copyright protection). It is not illegal to be in possession of material that was copied without permission.
In most countries, there is a standard format for citations. The guiding principle behind these is to make it easy to verify the law says what you claim it says. So you only need to give information needed to find the law you are citing. Usually, citations go the opposite of your example -- they start with the most general reference, and get more specific. Also, most citations only give information for sections that are numbered or lettered. Unless sentences are numbered or lettered, I would not cite them. For example, to find something in the US code, we need to know the: Title/Chapter/Section/subsection...and so on. For example, the federal law prohibiting the ownership of machine guns is in US Code, Title 18: Crimes and Criminal Procedure, Ch 44 Firearms, § 922 Unlawful Acts subsection (o)(1). Since sections are numbered consecutively, we usually leave out the chapter: 18 USC § 922(o)(1). In Ukraine, it appears law is organized into Codes, Chapters, Articles and Sections. Since Articles are numbered consecutively, we can leave out the Chapters. Thus, the citation for the definition of murder would be Ukrainian Criminal Code, Art 115 § 1. Caveat: I am not an expert in Ukrainian law and may be wrong on some details, so you should look at some Ukrainian legal sources to double check.
The law was first promulgated on June 8, 1940 By the 76th Congress. The original text is here. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly important piece of legislation and I can find commentary on it and I’m not going to read the debates - if you do, please get back to us. Two points to note, it was passed at a time when most of the rest of the world was at war and the US was quietly preparing to be at war and it seems to be intended to fill a gap in state law since conviction under state law is a defence under Federal.
If you're in the U.S., then section 117 of the Copyright Act is likely what you're looking for. The U.S. Copyright Office says: Under section 117, you or someone you authorize may make a copy of an original computer program if: the new copy is being made for archival (i.e., backup) purposes only; you are the legal owner of the copy; and any copy made for archival purposes is either destroyed, or transferred with the original copy, once the original copy is sold, given away, or otherwise transferred. Based on the information you provided, it sounds like you meet all three of these criteria. They also note that your particular software's license agreement might include special conditions that affect your right to make a backup copy. Such a warning would only make sense if it was legally possible for the software distributor to make such a limitation, so I'm afraid the direct answer to your main question is "yes". It's definitely not the norm - at least in my experiences - but it is a possibility so you'll need to consult your program's license agreement. There's also a possibility that the company misunderstood you and was thinking that you were running a backup server (in the sense of a redundant infrastructure) and not making an offline backup of your entire server. It's quite normal to require an additional license for the former case.