Song titles and copyrights As the copyright owner of a song, can another artist decide to change its title? Or should that be open to change by a performer who wants to perform the song?
Copyright doesn't prevent others from calling your work whatever they want to call your work. Look at 17 U.S. Code § 106, which lists the rights exclusively reserved to the copyright owner.
I don't see how. Remember that a license is a contract where the author gives permission to copy (modify, redistribute, remix, etc) a copyrighted work, provided that the licensee fulfills the stated conditions. If the license is not in effect, then we revert to the default situation under copyright law, which is that the potential licensee has no rights to copy the work. (Not counting particular instances of copying which are permitted under fair use and similar exceptions - I presume that's not what you have in mind, or the whole question is moot.) In this case, the conditions include that the licensee must credit the author under their chosen pseudonym. The licensee can't get out of that obligation simply because they find it distasteful or objectionable for whatever reason. If they don't want to do it, then they should not accept the license in the first place, and so refrain from copying the work. (Of course, if the author is offering the CC license in hopes of encouraging reuse of the work, then this may not be a desirable outcome for the author, so they might want to think twice about their choice of pseudonym.) Even if the author's pseudonym were something that would actually be illegal to quote (say, because it is obscene), I don't think it lets the licensee off the hook. A contract with illegal terms is void, so legally it is as if there is no license at all, and we revert to the default in which there is no right to copy. A question was raised in comments about the word &quot;reasonable&quot;. I don't know of case law where this has been tested, so I can only speculate: The context suggests that &quot;reasonable&quot; is intended to refer to the means of attribution (for instance, where the attribution should appear in a piece of source code or documentation), not to the pseudonym. There's a legal principle that the specific governs over the general, and the requirement to credit the author by a particular pseudonym is clearly more specific than the general requirement of &quot;reasonableness&quot;. It seems clear that the author, who is the one offering these terms, didn't intend for the general term &quot;reasonable&quot; to render meaningless their request for the use of a specific pseudonym; if they had, why would they have bothered to put it in? On the flip side, there's the principle of contra proferentem, that ambiguities in a contract should be resolved in the favor of the party that didn't draft it - here, the licensee. But it's hard to argue that this is really ambiguous; it seems quite clear what the author wants. Of course, the author can circumvent the whole issue, if they're worried, by licensing the work instead under a modified version of the CC license in which the word &quot;reasonable&quot; is removed. After all, there is nothing particular magical about CC's language: the contract is whatever the author and the licensee agree to, and they're just using the pre-written CC license as a convenience to streamline their negotiations.
It would not be a copyright. Names and short phrases are not subject to copyright, but it could be a trademark under common law ( e.g. state law in the U.S.) or could be registered. Some people think a trademark defines a product. That is not the case, a trademark identifies the source of a product or service.
A performance of copyrighted written music is copyright infringement. One of the bundle of rights that comes with a copyright is the performance right. You can obtain a license to cover copyrighted written music, however, on a mandatory basis for a royalty amount set by law, rather than only with the permission of the copyright owner as is the case with other copyrighted works. There are exceptions to the broad general scope of the the rights associated with a copyright, such as fair use, but a performance of instrumental music is not itself, in general, fair use.
The author of the book may have a copyright, because he created a new piece of work from the/a original work. For example, by translating it in another language or in a modernized language, by rearranging the content, by adding images or commentaries etc. You will therefore have to find a book or other source that is not or not anymore copyrighted.
There are now 2 works. An original, abandoned work, and a new, derivative work. The original creator owns the copyright over the original, and the new person owns copyright over the derivative he created. In your scenario, it will be the new creator, who will have the right to sue, if the gpl of the new work has been infringed
They can be, and usually would be. If someone uses a a keyboard or other instrument that records a MIDI file, that file is protected by copyright as soon as it is saved. Or if some person or group perform a work and captures the performance with a digital recorder and saves it to a MIDI file, again that MIDI file will be protected by copyright as soon as it is recorded. However, if an existing recording is converted into a MIDI format, the MIDI will have the same copyright as the source recording, if any. No new copyright is generated, just as there is no new copyright for making a photocopy of a book. If the original recording was PD, so will the MIDI file be. Similarly, if a MIDI file is created directly and automatically from a score, it would have the same copyright as the score, nothing added, nothing changed. If the score is PD, so is the MIDI. But often the publisher of a score will claim a copyright on that version, even if the composition is PD. Sometimes such a claim is valid, sometimes not. It depends on how much original content the publisher added. If a work that is under copyright is recorded in a MIDI file, the file will be subject to two copyrights, the one on the composition, and the one on the recording. And if permission is not obtained from whoever holds the copyright on the composition, this will be copyright infringement. (There are, however, some cases where the law grants an automatic license to a performer for a &quot;cover&quot; version of a copyrighted work.) If a work that is PD is recorded in a MIDI file, the file will be subject to only one copyright, the one on the recording. This will initially belong to the musicians, or to their employer, depending on the agreements they have made. In short a MIDI recording is not legally different from a recording on magnetic tape or on vinyl, or in any other medium. The copyright is on the performance, although it protects the recording.
This would likely be considered a derivative work. You would need permission from the copyright holder to make it, especially if you intend to distribute it for profit.