Is it legal to make a film with lightsabers in it in a different universe than Star Wars? Is it legal to make a film with lightsabers in it in a different universe than Star Wars? Is it legal to make a sci-fi films where there are no Jedi, but people wield lightsabers that are very similar to the ones in Star Wars? Assume for the sake of the question that every character in the film is blue-skinned and they wield orange-colored lightsabers and it's set in a sci-fi universe completely different from that of Star Wars. Is this considered a derivative work and thus infringes copyright, or can it be considered to be an original just because the setting is different?
&quot;Lightsaber&quot; is a trademarked term, so it's gotta be called something else. The idea behind a lightsaber is older than Star Wars, anyhow idea are not protected by copyright. The actual design of such a weapon would be protected, but it would be a matter for the jury to decide if the supposedly-infringing design was a copy of a Lucasfilms-protected object, or that of the cover of Analog, Jan. 1969. The &quot;setting&quot; of the movie is completely irrelevant, all that counts is whether the object &quot;copies&quot; the plaintiff's design. In light of the earlier Wolfling design, it's not a foregone conclusion that all lightsaber-resembling objects are infringing. Available evidence indicates that you will be sued if you do it, so consult a really good IP attorney.
Copyright never protects ideas as such, whether in movies, novels or text books or any other kind of work. However, if an aspect of work, such as a character, place or fictional society are sufficiently distinctive, and if another work uses that aspect, with detailed similarity to the previous work, it might be found to be a derivative work of the original. A derivative work requires permission from the copyright holder of the original work. For example, in Ursula K. LeGuin's famous SF novel The Left Hand of Darkness a fictional race or species, the Gethenians, is portrayed which is neither male nor female most of the time, but becomes sexually active and gendered a few days a month, and an individual may be male one month and female the next. This is an original and distinctive idea. Another author could create a different group of people with a similar nature without infringing copyright, but if the detailed description of how the process worked, or how it felt to the individuals involved was similar, that might make it a derivative work, and LeGuin's estate might be able to sue and win. This is something that gets decided on a case-by-case basis, and such decisions are highly fact-based. But if the new work has a society or species which is clearly different from any previously invented one, even though it shares some aspect, and if there is no detailed, point-by-point similarity, an infringement suit seems unlikely. Several SF authors have said &quot;Its not the idea, it's what you do with it that matters.&quot; Filmmakers, because of the money involved, tend to be more cautious than book authors. For example, Paramount bought rights to the &quot;flat cats&quot; from Robert A. Heinlein before filming the Star Trek episode &quot;The Trouble with the Tribbles&quot;, although the similarity was quite probably not enough for a successful infringement suit (but no one will ever know for sure, since they bought permission). This is described in some detail in David Gerrold's book about the making of that episode. Gerrold wrote that his conscious model was the importation of rabbits into Australia, not RAH's flat cats, but there are some similarities, and DG had read The Rolling Stone (where the flat cats appear) years before. In any specific case. consulting a lawyer with expertise in the area would be a good idea, as the details will matter.
Your client is confused about how copyright law works (at least in the United States and virtually every other country I've ever heard about copyright in). If I were guessing, they read something like this from the United States Copyright Office: The copyright in a derivative work covers only the additions, changes, or other new material appearing for the first time in the work. Protection does not extend to any preexisting material, that is, previously published or previously registered works or works in the public domain or owned by a third party. and figured that because it's a derivative work, the copyright only covers the additions and changes they make, and there's no copyright protection for the original work. This misunderstands the law: the original work still has its own copyright (assuming it hasn't expired), and permission from the holder of the copyright on the original work is required to create that derivative work in the first place*. The copyright on the derivative work is separate—that is, both copyrights exist in parallel. * Some exceptions, such as fair use, exist, but would be unlikely to apply to the situation you describe.
You can always get in trouble. Copyright is always protected by the laws of a particular nation, by the courts of that nation. Because of the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, I can sue you outside of my country, and will be treated as a person of that country. The conventions don't say who has jurisdiction, that is where you have to sue, so you have to resort to conventional jurisdictional principles. If you are in Europe, under the Brussels Convention, that means I have to sue you in your country of domicile (if you reside in multiple European nations, I get to decide which country to sue you in). The English courts are slightly different in that they generally hold that you sue in the country where the act took place, but (Lucasfilm v Ainsworth) you can sue in UK courts for infringement that occurs in the US. As you can see, this can get complicated. I can't sue you in Mongolian courts (assuming neither of us has any connection at all to Mongolia), but I could sue you (being a hypothetical UK citizen) in UK courts if you did the infringing deed while in Mongolia. Mongolian courts enforce Mongolian copyright law, US courts enforce US copyright law. Therefore you first have to decide what country you plan to sue in (from the plaintiff's perspective).
I'm assuming that you are in the UK, as you are talking about the British Standards Institue. In general the truth cannot be copyrighted but an expression of that truth can be, provided that it is creative or original to at least some extent. In this case the equations and constants you want to use are descriptions of scientific truths. If you translate them into another form (e.g. a computer program) then you are not copying the creative bit (the layout and arrangement of those equations and explanatory text), so you are not violating the copyright. Edit: I should also have said for (3) that their descriptions of the constants and variables will be copyright. You would have to avoid copying their words. However given that these are going to be terse descriptions of facts your words can still be pretty similar without infringing on copyright, because there are only so many ways of describing the acceleration due to gravity, or whatever. Take a look at some alternative references to see what words they use.
What real human teeth look like is a fact, and not subject to copyright. But some particular designer's or artist's image of human teeth would be protected by copyright, unless it is too old -- (prior to 1923 under US law), or unless it lost copyright in some other way. To create a derivative work based on such a copyrighted work would require permission from the copyright holder. Otherwise it is copyright infringement, and the holder could sue. As to the car models, the original designs would be protected by copyright, and a maker of a model should have permission in some form, or again the copyright holder could sue. Of course, a copyright holder is not required to sue, and if the value of the work is too small a suit might not pay. But that is not a matter of legal right, but of the holder's choice and business decision. A copyright holder could always change such a decision at a later time, when perhaps the value had increased. The exact laws on how to file copyright suits, and exceptions that might apply, vary by country. The question does not indicate what county it applies to.) But the basic principals are the same in all countries that adhere to the Berne Copyright Convention, which is all but a very few countries in the world. See this Wikipedia article for more details.
Yes. You could, assuming that you did not associate it with any real motion picture (which would be a trademark violation). You'd probably want to clarify in fine print somewhere, however, to avoid confusing your fans.
If you create a new work that is derived from or based on someone else's work, it is a derivative work, and you cannot do so without permission from the original copyright holder. If the original work is made available under a CC-BY_SA 4.0 license, you have permission, but it comes with conditions. One of those is that you must attribute the original work -- you must say what work yours is based on and who created it. Another is that you must license your own derived work under the same CC-BY-SA license (or a compatible one). This does not mean that your work is not copyrighted -- it is. But it does mean that you must grant to others the same rights that the creator of the work you used granted to you. That is what the "share alike" or SA part of the license means. if you don't like that, you should not use a work licensed under CC-BY-SA terms to create your own work. If you publish your work but fail to grant that license to others, you are infringing the copyright of the work you used, and could be sued. Note that if you had created a compilation rather than a derived work -- for example if you created an album of images from various sources, some of them under CC-BY-SA licenses, you would retain a copyright on the collection as a whole, and that would not have to be under CC-BY-SA. But in this case you say that you used the other person's image as a background for your own illustration. That is creating an "adapted" or derivative work, i am fairly sure, and invokes the share alike clause of the license. You might also want to consider the different case mentioned in If I include an unmodified CC-BY-SA work in a book, does the whole book have to be CC-BY-SA?