Are lone excerpts considered derivative works? Specific context: I am in the United States as is the owner of the work. The work is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Someone has digitized a public domain reference dictionary and posted it on the internet under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0. It is in a format where the entire contents of the dictionary are in a single web page. I would like to make a searchable version of this dictionary (it is very hard to navigate in a single web page). In this case, I would be providing a web page that contains a search bar, and the results would be unmodified excerpts from the original digitized version corresponding to the entry being requested. Does this break the terms of CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0?
If we subtract the public domain aspect of the situation, CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 means that you may not &quot;Share&quot; any &quot;Adapted Materials&quot;. Share means what you think it means: you can adapt materials for yourself, you cannot share (redistribute) that adaptation. &quot;Adapted materials&quot; is material &quot;translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor&quot;. No you may not, if you are talking about material protected by copyright. Material that is simply digitized does not gain copyright protection from being digitized, see Bridgeman v. Corel. So if a work was un-creatively digitized and was in the public domain, then it does not become re-protected by the act of scanning. However, if the work was creatively digitized, even minimally, then that new work is protected by copyright.
The reason is 17 USC 106: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following... (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work The original picture is the underlying protected work. The ASCII reproduction is a derivative work. If you get permission to make the derivative work, it is okay. Otherwise, it is copyright infringement. There is an escape clause, "fair use", which amounts to taking a chance that you won't be sued and then arguing that you didn't do them any prohibited harm. If you make any money off of the game, you have a major strike against you. I suggest reading the fair use FAQ; basically, it is really hard to know how a fair use defense will fare, but based on prior cases, I'd say it's infringement, not fair use.
You are framing it wrong. It is not that "they have put a barrier" to public domain information, it is that they have added an additional source of that information. The new source has a barrier, yes, but that does not prevent you from accessing the same information elsewhere. If you own a copy of some public domain data, you are not allowed to prevent other users from accessing other copies (by claiming copyright infringement or the like); you cannot even prevent people from doing copies from the copies you did provide them. But you are not forced to allow other users to access your copy. Consider the logical conclusion if that were the law. The moment that you downloaded some public domain file into your computer, you would be forced to give access to your hard disk from the internet, isn't it? Would you need to leave your home door open if you happened to have a printed copy of the text there? Of course, there is a need to discriminate between "public domain" (without licence) and "not public domain but open licence" (BSD, CC, GPL, etc.). In the later case the licence could be tailored so that the work could appear in archive.org but that it would be illegal to provide it with the business model of Academia.edu1. But that would be possible only for works not in the public domain. 1 To be decided by a judge on the basis of the wording of the licence and jurisdiction.
No. The images are copyrighted, and you are using them in a way that would leave you with virtually no argument for fair use. The factors for fair use are set out in 17 USC 107, and they indicate that the courts would reject your use: The purpose and character of the use, including whether it is of a commercial nature or for nonprofit educational purposes: There's no indication that your use would be for nonprofit or educational purposes. The nature of the copyrighted work: Works of fiction and art are highly creative works at the heart of the policy for copyright protection. The amount of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole: You are apparently copying entire images, though I suppose you could argue that each image is just one small portion of a larger book or website. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work: You are trying to create a board game, putting yourselves basically in direct competition with the makers of D&amp;D. I generally prefer a pretty liberal interpretation of what constitutes fair use, but this just has virtually nothing that would make me comfortable arguing in your favor.
Regardless of the license associated with a document, there is no copyright protection on information. Copyright protection prevents copying "expression", e.g. the wording, but not the facts / opinions expressed through those words. The non-legal academic concept of "plagiarism" is where the notion of attribution primarily comes into play. There is a special exception under 17 USC 106A that imposes an attribution requirement for works of visual art. CC and other license schemes may add in an attribution requirement for actual copying of the expression (the "BY" attribute in CC). If a work is licensed under CC-BY, you may copy the actual expression provided that you follow the terms of the license, which primarily means that you have to attribute the work in the prescribed manner. This does not apply to extracting information from a work, because information is not protected by copyright.
It is legsl to include references showing readers where facts you include in your article were derived, or where they can be supported. Indeed academic ethics generally require doing so, although there is (in most cases) no legal requirement to do so. Listing the title, author, and publication information of a source is not an infringement of copyright. That J. Jones published an article on &quot;How to Find the Purple Moth&quot; [imaginary example] in volume 28 of the Journal of Moth Science is a fact.Facts are never protected by copyright. Indeed in US law 17 USC 102(b) provides that: 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. The laws of other countries are similar on this point. Indeed I do not know of any country in which facts are protected by copyright. So, including such references is fully legal, and no permission from the sources being cited is required. This is true whatever form the reference takes. In particular, if an online address for the content is included, this is still true. I do not know whether Medium, or any other specific publishing platform, will pat fees to authors based on clik-thru from such citations. That depends on their particular policies, which might be found in their Terms of Service or other policy document.
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.
A document, or an image of a document, created using a font would not be considered to be a derivative work of that font. If it were, our system of licensing fonts would need to be significantly different. In any case the part of the license which reads: [This license] allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. It specifically permits such use of the fonts. By &quot;derivatives&quot; the license seems to mean modified versions of the fonts, which it permits the licensee to create and use subject to certain restrictions. This seems to be confirmed by the license text which says: The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the fonts or their derivatives. The plain meaning of this is that derivatives of the fonts are used to create documents, not that they are documents themselves, and that in any case &quot;any document created using the fonts&quot; is not subject to the license restriction.