Are you allowed to solve an exercise from a book more than seven times? In Germany, apparently, you are allowed to make a &quot;Privatkopie&quot; at most seven times. Are you allowed to write down an exercise on a device using a note taking app more than seven times? Does writing down exercises count? Precisely, in math, when you solve an algebraic problem, you usually start by writing down the initial problem and proceeding from there. Now that means you made one &quot;Privatkopie&quot;? Now what if you some time later want to solve the same algebraic problem again, writing down the initial problem, ... You made another &quot;Privatkopie&quot;? I'm precisely talking about Germany, and books that the author told not to copy, ...
You can make as many &quot;manual copies&quot; of math homework for yourself as you like. The seemingly arbitrary number of &quot;7&quot; came into being because with the invention and popularity of devices for copying, private persons could make copies without considerable loss of quality. As it was impossible to control who made a copy and whom it was given to, a compromise was found: buying a copying machine (tape recorder, cd burner, dvd burner) or empty media (empty cassette tapes, empty CDs) came with an extra fee on top to be paid by the consumer, that would go to the copyright holders in general, with the assumptions that that would cover the &quot;normal, uncontrollable, private between friends&quot; copying. Like if you burn your mom a CD. Or gift your girlfriend a mix tape. Or copy a page of the book and hand out the excercise to your two study buddies. So there was a court decision that &quot;more than seven&quot; was more than what you would normally consider a private copy covered by this fee. If you make more than seven copies of a cassette for example, it would be okay to assume that you no longer did that &quot;for a close friend&quot;. Obviously, copying something from a book as you describe, by writing it down with a pencil on a notepad, is in no way &quot;a lossless copy&quot;. Even if you type it into an app, manually copying something into another medium is not lossless. Ever. It is also for your very personal use, you don't give it to anyone, not even close friends. So yes, you can make as many copies as you like, for yourself. If one breaks, and you make another, that is fine. If one breaks every day and you need 700 over the course of two years? Fine. But if you made 700 exact copies to give them to your &quot;700 closest friends&quot;, that is not how the law thinks &quot;closest friends&quot; work. That is where the arbitrary number 7 comes from.
User manuals are indeed copyrighted. On the other hand, since the people building the cranes are most likely interested in people reading these manuals, there is a good chance that you would get permission to copy them, for example as part of a mobile app, if you ask the manufacturer. On the other hand, it is possible that the manual was written by a third party, who receives some fixed amount of money for every manual that the manufacturer gives away to customers for free. In that case, copying would destroy that persons earnings, so permission would be unlikely. You definitely need to ask for permission and can't go forward without permission. It would also be possible that the crane manufacturer will want to check out your app to make sure that everything is correct - if someone damages a crane because of some omissions in your app, that would be very bad for them.
Recipe books can be, and often are, protected by copyright. If the individual recipes are by others, this would constitute a collective work or compilation. See this recent answer for more on the rights protected for a collective work. The selection of which recipes to include would be a creative element, protected by copyright, and could not be copied or closely imitated without permission. However, division into groups by type of dish would be a &quot;natural and obvious&quot; arrangement, and not protected. So would alphabetical or chronological arrangement within a group, or over all. A &quot;non-obvious&quot; order of recipes would however be a protectable element. An individual recipe may be protected by copyright, but this protects less than one might think. Copyright does not protect facts or methods. This means that the list of ingredients is not protected, nor is the general list of steps of preparation. Only the exact wording of the recipe will be protected. Creating a new collection of recipes based on several different previously published collections of recipes (whether from the web, books, magazines, or other media) and making one's own selections of which ones to include that is significantly different from any of the previous collections would not violate the collection copyrights of any of the previous collections. If the actual recipes were rewritten so that any creative expression from the originals was not copied, then it seems that no copyright infringement has occurred. Most recipes, after all, are not fully original but are modified from older ones. There is no set figure for how many recipes could be copied from a given source before this becomes infringement. That would be, if a suit was field, a matter for the judgement of the count as to whether the new book was &quot;based on&quot; the alleged source. The more the list in the new work resembles a particular source, the more like a derivative work it seems and the more likely that it would be held to be an infringement. One could always ask for a license from the older source, to avoid any risk of suit, but it might not be available or the copyright holder might demand an excessive fee. Asking for a license risks drawing attention to the new work, as well, and might cause a holder to file suit who otherwise would not.
No, copyright absolutely does not protect anything "novel" or anything related to algorithms or generally anything functional at all. Copyright only protects your "expressed representation of a creative work". Other people can duplicate your work with a different "expression" and not be infringing on copyright. And if there is nothing creative in your work then it's not even eligible for copyright in the first place. For example, if you figure out how to sort an array with fewer computational steps than what anybody else is doing then that is functional code, not creative code, and anybody can reverse engineer/duplicate your sorting algorithm. However, patents do provide the protection you're looking for. If you want to protect your fancy algorithm then apply for a patent. Patents expire an order of magnitude sooner than copyright, but they are the only means of legally protecting this type of intellectual property. Unlike copyright, patent protection is only available if you apply for it, and it has to be approved by the relevant government department in your country (although you can start using the patented technology before approval has gone through).
In the most likely case No, but you can make it happen! First - almost every patent is rejected - at first. Then you respond to the office action rejection by arguing and/or amending and - guess what - you are likely to get a final rejection. That means the rejection is final until you pay them more money to file a Request for Continued Examination and get two more go-arounds with them. Can you keep doing this? Yes. A previous director of the USPTO tried to make a rule that limited the number of RCEs - the courts knocked it down. If you give up and let it go abandoned by not responding to an office action within the statutory limit (6 months) then the process of that application is over. If you have not filed a co-pending application before the initial application went abandoned then you are really starting over if you file a new application. The original application can be used against any new application on a similar subject matter if it has been published. But it might not have published. The law (35 USC 102) contains - (a) NOVELTY; PRIOR ART.—A person shall be entitled to a patent unless— (1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention; or (2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151 , or in an application for &gt;patent published or deemed published under section 122(b) , in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention. Your application may or may not have been published. Then it is neither published or issued and does not fall under prior art under 102 or 103. Applications are automatically published by the USPTO at the 18 month point unless you requested non-publication. In that case if your application never issues it is never public and can't be used against you or anyone else as prior art. You could even decide to keep it a trade secret. Before the publication process came into being as part of TRIPS, an applicant could wait until they saw the claims that had been allowed and the patent was ready to go. If they didn't feel the claims were valuable enough they can chose to explicitly abandon and keep it secret.
Copyright includes authorization of derivative works such as translations, so you must have permission of the copyright holder to create a translation. You could be sued for creating the unauthorized translation for your friend. If you attempt to further distribute the book, the chances of getting sued increase substantially. That path probably includes your legal obligation to foot the bill for the publisher and distributor having to defend themselves in court, since your contract with the publisher or distributor probably includes an indemnification clause saying that you indemnify them (pay their costs) against damages for your infringement. So your are at risk, and it increases if you do anything to distribute the translation.
In the US, you cannot copyright facts. See, for example, Feist Publications Inc v. Rural Telephone Service Co, where a phone book was held to be not copyrightable. You can, however, copyright a particular arrangement of facts, if there is at least a spark of creativity involved. You can't copyright a recipe, but you CAN copyright a cookbook. In general, you're OK if you copy the fluid capacity from the manual, so long as you don't copy the manual itself.
A book (or any other creative work) published in the 1800s is now in the public domain everywhere in the world (excepting odd cases like Peter Pan where a special rule applies in some jurisdictions.) Anyone may legally quote from such a work at any length with no legal requirement for permission. In fact there is no legal requirement to attribute the quote to the author (although there is an ethical requirement). In fact one may publish a new edition of such a work, unchanged or modified in any way one chooses, with no legal need to obtain permission from anyone or to pay any royalties or fees. If the work were recent enough to still be protected by copyright, a limited quote could be used under fair use, fair dealing or another exception to copyright under the laws of most countries. The exact rules vary by country, and are often highly fact-dependent, so the exact details will matter. If one wanted to quote enough from a recent work that permission is required, the copyright holder, who is often not the publisher, would need to grant permission. That is often the author or the author's heir, but it can be a person or firm to which the author transferred the rights. Sometimes the rights-holder can be hard to identify. Update: it would be possible for a work published in, say, 1890 by an author then young who lived to a fairly old age, dying in, say 1960, to still be protected in some countries, although not in the US. (Anything published before 1925 is now PD in the US.) But Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, and all of her work has long been in the public domain