Question about copyright, plagiarism and attribution If I'm going to describe the origin of the word "dinosaur" and I say that the taxon Dinosauria was formally named in 1841 by paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, and that the foregoing description is copied and pasted directly from Wikipedia (which it is), I think we can agree that it's: a type of plagiarism. improper, possibly dishonest or negligent in not attributing the source. violates the license terms of Wikipedia's content, which is (roughly speaking) CC BY-SA. If I paraphrased the quote using my own words I think we can agree to points 1 and 2, but maybe not point 3 (I'm not sure, maybe someone can clarify). The tricky thing about this is summed up in the following question: Assuming that nearly all my knowledge is accumulated by reading books and hearing things (whether publications, broadcasts, or people) which may be copyrighted or have license terms, in what circumstances could content that I publish reasonably be assumed to not need attribution? Following on from that, I can say from my general knowledge that the speed of light in a vacuum is about 186,000 miles (or 300,000 km) per second. However if I wanted to give a more precise figure I would look it up either in an encyclopedia or in a dictionary and round it off to the closest mile or kilometer per second. Once I've checked about 5 sources to get a more precise figure, I would be tempted either to pick one and attribute the one source, or simply state that figure without attribution either because I might feel it's a number that I've learned or the number I've arrived at is synthesized from about 6 sources, and simply don't want to cite each one. Probably a better example is the meaning of a word. In a personal creative work I might give the meaning of the word "rapprochement". I may feel I can already give a good definition because I know the meaning of it. But just to be sure I consult 5 dictionaries, maybe some other sources, and formulate a definition based on a synthesis from my previous general knowledge and the recent sources I consulted. In circumstances such as these what are the obligations to cite a source for your information? I guess the question is based on the fact that nearly all knowledge is sourced from something or someone that/who was not you, and I'm just wondering whether I'm wrong in thinking that I don't need to attribute a source if I'm telling you something that I read in an article yesterday. After all, I don't need to attribute a source, for plagiarism or license violations purposes, for something I know from reading an article five years ago, or from reading from Collins Dictionary five years ago. Also, I can say the four largest moons of Jupiter were discovered in 1610. I had to look that up, but no one knows that, nor where I got that information from. I'm talking purely from a legal point of view. I realize that if I say something it's in my interests to give citations of where I got that information from just for the purpose of appearing trustworthy, but I'm not talking about that. I'm purely talking about legal obligations.
In the US, at least, facts - like the speed of light, the name of a dinosaur or the moons of Jupiter - are not copyrightable. But the words or pictures, designs and original work used to express and present those facts in books, websites and other publications by individuals and publishers are copyrightable. (Original work doesn't need to be published to be copyrighted; it is copyrighted at the moment of creation.) See How can &quot;factual&quot; intellectual property be protected? Plagiarism can be copyright infringement; it's copying and presenting work of someone else's as your own. But not all copyright infringement is plagiarism in the sense that someone is claiming others' work as their own: if you're selling a T-shirt with an unlicensed design, you're not really claiming the design is yours; you're just trying to make money. If you use all or part of an image or a quote or a song from a copyrighted source in your own work, you need permission and attribute the source. Or, you have to decide if the amount of the copyrighted material you are using might be Fair Use and you don't need permission. But decisions on what might constitute Fair Use are ultimately decided in court, because that's where can you end up when a person or a publisher sues you for alleged copyright infringement.
It is reasonable to interpret the statement in their Github repository README.md as a "public domain" license for anything contained there. However, their "usage guidelines" backpedals a bit ("generally are not copyrighted", the misleading implication that content used commercially is subject to restrictions that educational and personal uses are not subject to). Although it is true that works "created by the US government" are not protected by copyright, not everything associated with a government agency is created by the US government. An agency might have a policy that they will not post material that is not copyright-free, there is no practical means of knowing if an item is an actual government work, versus a government-supported or government-hosted work (where copyright is held by someone else). If you trust their implication that all of those items in the repository are indeed government works, then they are free of copyright. I don't know any reason to not believe them, although sometimes the government is wrong and they end up liable big-time for infringement. However... NASA Open Source Agreement Version 1.3 (another copy on a NASA web page) on first glance seems to contradict the "government work" theory. Here, they claim to grant certain rights to users and also impose impose restrictions (including obligatory registration). This does not make any sense for a work that is in the public domain. The license is legally defective in that it fails to fill in relevant blanks (agency name, title of work, URL for obligatory registration). Also notice that the license is only for software. The scope of that license therefore has to be something narrower – it applies only to software, and presumably software that is not "a government work". I have no idea what software NASA could legally give away and is not a government work which is therefore not protected by copyright.
(Note: the answer below deals with US copyright law only.) There are specific carve-out in the &quot;fair use&quot; law for &quot;scholarship&quot; and &quot;research&quot;: Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The US Copyright Office has some more information about how courts have interpreted fair use, as does Nolo. Going through these criteria one by one: A work that is commercial is less likely to be fair use. A work that is &quot;transformative&quot;, meaning that it serves a different purpose than the original, is more likely to be fair use. Quoting from a factual work (such as an encyclopedia) is more likely to be fair use than quoting from a creative or imaginative work (such as a novel). The less quoted, the better. If the quoted material is peripheral to the primary purpose of the quoted work, it is more likely to be fair use than if it's &quot;the heart of the work&quot;. (As an example, The Nation was once found to have violated fair use because it quoted verbatim the section of Gerald Ford's memoirs that dealt with the Nixon pardon — even though the quoted section was less than 0.2% of the entire work.) If your work will be directly competing with the original work in the market, it is less likely to be fair use. Nolo also notes that Quoting a short passage in a scholarly, scientific, or technical work for illustration or clarification of the author's observations would be deemed acceptable. An art historian would be able to use an image of a painting in an academic article that analyzes the painting. Finally: even if you check every one of these boxes, the law is not 100% crystal clear, and there's still a chance that you'll get sued. While you might prevail in court, you'd still have to go through the hassle of defending your work; or alternately, you'd have to pull it from the market. For this reason, it may be worth your peace of mind to seek permission from the copyright holders anyhow, or to consult a legal professional.
It depends on where you are For example, in USA copyright exists in a literary or artistic work stored in permanent form like a book, a movie, an audio recording, a building etc. In contrast, in Australia there is no requirement for the work to be stored - that means copyright can exist in a spoken lecture. The owner of the copyright (usually, but not necessarily the creator) has the right to choose if and how their work is copied and if and how any derivative works may be made from it. For your example, the book is an original work in which copyright vests with the author(s), your notes are a derivative work in which copyright vests in you. However, you presumably did not have permission to make your derivative work so that makes it prima facie a copyright infringement. Fortunately, in the USA there exists a Fair Use defence and in Commonwealth countries the slightly less permissive Fair Dealing defence (if you are somewhere else you will need to do your own research). Search this site or read the copyright article on Wikipedia to learn about these defences. Long answer short (too late!), taking notes to aid your own study is almost certainly Fair Use/Dealing. So is sharing it with your friends. Publishing it may or may not be depending on all sorts of factors; for example, if you were to write a study guide for say a Harry Potter book for use by English literature students this is probably OK even if it is a for profit activity, because criticism is Fair Use/Dealing. Citing work is not necessary to comply with copyright law. Failing to cite may be academic misconduct but that is not a legal matter; its a matter for your academic institution.
Probably Not The creator or owner of a piece of software does not in general have any copyright over the output when others run the software, unless that output is itself a derivative work of input supplied by the copyright owner, or forming part of the software. In this case the translation is a derivative work of the 19th century original, but that is assumed to be in the public domain. SAo google has no copyright on the resulting translation. But copyright protection is only available for &quot;original works of authorship&quot;. (See 17 USC 102 in the US, and similar laws elsewhere.) A machine-produced translation is not an original work, and it is surely not then work of the author of the overall book. However, the author would still have a copyright on the book as a whole. The legal situation is no different than if the author had simply quoted a 19th century work. One may incorporate public domain works into a later work, and that later work is still protected by copyright, provided that there is enough original contentr to make the work as a whole &quot;an original work of authorship&quot;. Others may use the PD [arts, or the original from which they are taken, but not the rest of the work (beyond what fair use would allow in any case). For example, I have made a number of posts here on LAW.SE. In several,of those I quoted sections from one of the numbers of The Federalist. That 19th century work is in the public domain. Anyone else may re-quote the passages I quoted from it. But that gives them no rights to use the rest of my work, except as the CC-BY-SA license or fair use permits. So the author would retain copyright on the book as a whole. But soemoen who merely quotes or uses the translated 19th century article but none of the original parts of the book would not be infringing that copyright. I say probably in the header, because I do not have any actual case-law to cite here. It is possible that some court has rules otherwise on the subject of the copyright on the output of a software tool, but I strongly doubt it.
Publication after the author's death is still publication. As you can see in this excellent chart this work is copyrighted for 95 years after the publication date under US law. If it had never been published, it would be protected by copyright for 70 years after the death of Lovecraft, the author (a term which has now expired). However, statements of genealogy would be facts, and as such are not protected by copyright. limited quotes to support those facts would be appropriate in a work of non-fiction, and would normally be permitted as fair use under US law. Such quotes would probably not be appropriate in fiction in any case. The exact wording of the genealogy would probably be protected, but not the relationships (who is the parent of whom, etc).
Details depend on the juristiction. For that, consult a lawyer if you plan to publish your app anywhere. But generally, even simple texts from exercises can be covered by copyright. Compare song lyrics, which are not much longer (and might not involve more creative thought than a good exercise ...). For vocabulary lists, it gets more tricky, but those can be covered as well if the assembly of the list was a creative effort. So if you simply list the 1,000 most common worlds in English and their translation, you are possibly fine, but if the words are divided into units and lessons, that's creative work.
Plagiarism only marginally intersects copyright infringement. If I take an article published by Jones in an obscure journal and publish it to another journal under my name, with some light paraphrasing, that is both plagiarism and copyright infringement. If I publish that article under Jones' name, that is copyright infringement and not plagiarism. If I completely rewrite the ideas of the article and publish under my name (not crediting the original author, that is plagiarism and not copyright infringement). The essence of plagiarism is taking the ideas of another without giving credit. The essence of copyright infringement is copying without permission. So there is no legal penalty to taking credit for someone else's ideas. As for your economic question, an infringer may be liable for compensatory damages. Therefore, an author whose work would garner $50,000 in royalties would not seek the minimal statutory damages, he would go for the $50,000 in lost revenue.