Is citing research publications in a blog post enough, or are there additional rights one must obtain? Say someone is writing a blog post on some science topic, and wants to show some mathematical expressions in the piece. What are the rights one has in showing equations that appear in published articles? I imagine if the equation is a well-established, oft-used equation that nobody owns the expression/content (e.g. the equation for entropy or mutual information). But if the equation is the creation of the author of some publication, as in the author is expressing some unique mathematical expression, obviously the publication should be referenced. But is referencing enough? Are there additional rights one must obtain from the publication and/or author in order to show this content? For example, in theses one must obtain the rights to reference articles in addition to providing the citations. One can imagine how arduous this would be (obtaining rights) for frequently published blog posts. And how would this differ between say ArXiv which is open access, and a publication that is pay-only, like Elsevier or Nature?
how would this differ between say ArXiv which is open access, and a publication that is pay-only, like Elsevier or Nature? It wouldn't. But if the equation is the creation of the author of some publication, as in the author is expressing some unique mathematical expression, obviously the publication should be referenced. But is referencing enough? Are there additional rights one must obtain from the publication and/or author in order to show this content? Laws of nature, including purported laws of nature, are not protected by copyright. So, usually, key equations in an academic paper aren't protected by copyright law. Referencing the work is important as a matter of academic ethics, but is legally irrelevant. Copying of exposition by the author beyond laws of nature is permitted as fair use if it is limited to quotations necessary for academic discussion and criticism, but copying of an entire work would not be permissible fair use in most cases and would constitute copyright infringement. Of course, there is a large gray area between those extremes.
Yes That is very simple - copyright is an exclusive right that starts automatically with the creation of a copyrightable work. The default situation is that the author has an exclusive rights to make copies of the work and derivative works. If the code is published somewhere by the author but the author has not said anything about its licence or copyrights, then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. They have the right to just publish it somewhere, others don't. If you try to contact the author and they don't say anything and ignore you, then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. If it's impossible to find the author (e.g. I have certain cases with literary works where it's not clear who inherited the rights after the author died), then the default situation applies - you need permission and you don't have it, so it's not legal for you to distribute their copyrighted works. That being said, certain forms of reuse (recreating ideas, learning from them, etc) would not be a copyright violation. But in general the situation with the author not saying anything is almost the same as the author explicitly stating "all rights reserved, you're not allowed to do anything, violators will be shot" - some specific uses are allowed even against author's wishes (e.g. 'fair use' clauses) but everything that needs their permission really does need their explicit permission.
It's hard to say, under the Twitter TOS. They do not claim that copyright is transferred to them: &quot;You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your photos and videos are part of the Content)&quot;. But you do license the content: By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services. The totality of conditions, including the Twitter Rules, is ever-evolving and not apparently contained in a single link. From what I can tell, there is no condition that prohibits a user from copying tweets into a book. There are numerous statements about &quot;respecting copyright&quot; which refer to taking material that is not licensed to Twitter and redistributing: nothing about redistributing licensed material.A plain reading of the first bold sentence says that you can make your content available to the world, not restricted to &quot;retweeting&quot;.
Short Answer No meaningful intellectual property protection is available for BCI calculus, BI calculus, or SK calculus. Long Answer Copyright Protection There are several categories of things that can’t be copyrighted. A common thread to most of them is that they lack the necessary creativity to be eligible for copyright. Ideas This includes procedures, processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, or discoveries. Plans, methods, and devices, are also not protectable. However the particular manner in which they are expressed or described in a writing can be copyrighted. (Source) Copyright can protect a particular expression of an idea (e.g. the layout and exact language of a page in a textbook about BCI calculus that is not the only possible way to present it), but not a concept or system like BCI calculus. The same reasoning means that it is probably not possible to copyright BI calculus or SK calculus, even though a particular textbook expressing them in a particular way might be possible to protect with copyright. Also, since BCI calculus is derived from publications in mathematics journals made in 1924 and 1930 by its two lead creators, anything derived from the original publications would probably be in the public domain by now. In the United States: every book and tale published before 1927 is in the public domain; American copyrights last for 95 years for books originally published between 1927 and 1978 if the copyright was properly registered and maintained. It is likely that the copyright for the 1930 journal article in question was not registered and maintained, as it was not routine practice for mathematical journals to do so at the time. Even if it was, the copyright for the 1930 paper would be almost spent and would expire in the year 2025. The Alternative Of Patent Protection Patents can protect ideas of ways to implement something, but also has limitations that probably exclude BCI calculus as something that could be patented: Certain things can never be patented, regardless of how well they meet these four standards. They include the elements, theoretical plans, laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas. So patenting fire or the wheel is out, though some people have tried. (Source) Any patent received for BCI calculus prior to the year 2002 would also have expired bringing the subject matter of the patent into the public domain. Also, since BCI calculus is something that has already been disclosed to the public, it is barred from patentability as a form of existing prior art. The existence of prior art would also prevent BI calculus and SK calculus from being patented. Trade Secret Protection Considered It also probably isn't possible to protect BCI calculus (or BI calculus or SK calculus) as a trade secret, because it has been disclosed to the public and hence isn't secret. (Source) Trade Mark Protection Considered It might be possible to protect the name &quot;BCI calculus&quot; as a trademark under which services teaching people to use it are marketed, but that wouldn't protect the underlying system or concepts. But there is a strong argument that this would not even qualify as a trademark because it is merely descriptive and does not have a &quot;secondary meaning&quot; particular to a particular user of the label for the system.
In general this kind of brief literary reference is not unlawful, and such things occur in both novels and commercial games with some frequency. Making such a reference a major part of the plot, such as by using a name from a previous work as a major character, particularly if other aspects of that character are also used, is far more likely to cause a problem. In the united-states this would be a matter of fair use. In general, when only a very small part of the source work is used, such a a single name; where the use is &quot;transformative&quot;, that is used for a rather different purpose than in the source work; where the use does not harm the market for the original work; and where the use does not serve as a replacement for the original, it is likely to be held to be fair use. But fair use decisions are always fact-dependent, and are made case-by-case, so it is hard to be absolutely sure of one in advance. But the kind of literary reference described in the question is very unlikely to be held to be copyright infringement.
Any adapted work derived from a work used under a CC-BY-SA licnese must be distributed, if at all, under a compatible license. The question is whether a large work incorporating a much smaller work is said to be "based on" that work. The CC-BY-SA 4.0 legal text does not use "include" or "incorporate" or any similar term to define an adapted work, instead it says: Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image. If including a single work makes your book Adapted Materiel, than you must either release the book under the same license, or else not rely on the CC license. I am not at all sure if such use would make the book Adapted Materiel. If the content could be quoted (perhaps only in part) based on fair use or fair dealing or a similar theory, you would not be relaying on the license. But whether such use is legitimate is always a very fact-bound question, which will depend on various specific facts. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? for a summary of US fair use principles. If the materiel you want to use would not qualify under fair use (or whatever similar principle applies in your jurisdiction), and the book would be considered Adapted Material, then you would have to omit it or put the book under the CC license. I see in The CC case law page the statement that: The atlas was a compilation not a derivative work, so did not need to be licensed under the SA term, Which might apply to your book. If it does, you would not need to place the book under a CC license. Update: On reading CC's detailed wiki page on Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group, LLC I find the statement that Use of a whole work is suggestive of a "compilation" rather than a derivative work subject to the ND/SA terms. attributed to the US District court (DC district) that decided this case in 2014. If that decision were followed, it would seem that the book would not be considered a derivative work and while proper attribution must be provided, and the applicable license must be indicated, the book itself need not be released under CC-BY-SA.
You are correct that it is quite expensive to patent something in U.S. law. Under U.S. patent law, once an idea is publicly published, if no one else has a patent application for the same idea that is pending, the idea enters the public domain and no one can obtain a patent of that idea. The publication become "prior art" with respect to any future patent application which cannot be protected by patent law. Of course, if you publish an invention which you discovered independently, that someone else already has a patent application pending for that will be approved the following week, the fact that you published it after the patent was applied for doesn't prevent the person with the pending patent application from having it approved. The term "invention" rather than "idea" is what I will use for the remainder of this answer, because there are many ideas which may not be patented, while the lion's share of patentable ideas are appropriately described as "inventions." But, understand that as used in this answer, the term "invention" is being used to refer to the concepts and ideas necessary to make the invention, and not to a particular instance of a product made using those concepts and ideas. When an invention is in the public domain, anyone can utilize the invention free of charge without a license. People who use the invention are not even required to acknowledge that you invented or discovered it. An invention is also not eligible to be patented if more than a year has elapsed since the first sale of a product using it. But, in that case, the invention can still be protected as a trade secret until it is voluntarily disclosed in some fashion to someone who is not subject to a non-disclosure agreement. (I say voluntary, because the fact that, for example, an unauthorized corporate spy sees the trade secret doesn't end the status of the invention as a trade secret.) Some inventions, are effectively publicly disclosed and published the moment that anyone looks at it closely. The patentable element of other inventions are invisible to an end user, or to observer of an end user. For example, if the invention involves something in the interior of a device, or the invention involves something not visible to the naked eye (e.g. a process for synthesizing an industrial chemical from other chemicals where the chemical formula of the ingredients and end result can't be determined without a microscope or analytical chemistry tests), merely showing someone a product made using the invention will not put it in the public domain. It is generally legal to reverse engineer or independently come up with an invention which is merely a trade secret. It is not legal to use a patented invention or process, even if it is not directly copied and is instead reverse engineered or independently discovered, during the lifetime of the patent. There is no straightforward way to put an invention into the public domain while retaining any right to acknowledgement that you invented it or otherwise exercise control through a licensing agreement without patenting it.
Suppose Publisher printed 10,000 copies under the terms of the contract, and within those two years they sold 7,000 copies (and paid royalties). If you did not receive leftover copies at the end of the 2 years, then either (1) they broke the contract or (2) at the last minute they sold the remainder to some third party. If the latter is the case, they would be obligated to pay royalties on that last sale, and the numbers should add up (assuming you know how many were printed initially). If they failed to pay royalties, or they continued to sell the book, you would need to send your lawyer after them. Another possibility is the lost-email excuse – "We emailed you asking if you wanted the books, and you didn't reply, so we sold them" (disposing of does not necessary mean "destroy"). The burden would be on them to prove that they offered you the remainders and you elected not to purchase (if that is the wording – the contract could have required a specific refusal, not just a failure to respond). Under the contract, Publisher can't just decide to keep printing the book, nor can they continue to distribute it (but a third party could distribute existing copies forever). You would have "legal exposure" i.e. some risk of being sued if you republish, but it might be minimal – definitely get your attorney to advise you on that. Vendors might refuse to sell the republished work if they think it is an unauthorized edition.