Burden of Proof for Reprinting a Book You republish a book from 1923 without asking anyone. The original publisher (or its successor) sues you. Do you need to proof that the author is 70 years dead already, or lies the burden of proof on the publisher?
Short answer: §§ 64 ff. UrhG is not a defense (Einwendung) but an integral/constitutional component of copyright. Accordingly the party favoring the fact that a work is (still) copyrighted has the burden of proof. Long answer: Copyright cases are divided into four steps: Copyrightable work? (Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Werk?) Applicable exploitation rights? (Tangierte Nutzungsrechte?) Exceptions? (Schrankenregelungen?) Damages. (Schadensersatz) In a civil action suit parties need to present facts, § 282 ZPO (Beibringungsgrundsatz). The court/state does not investigate anything. That means the plaintiff contending that he has a claim for damages needs to demonstrate that it’s a copyrightable work, they are the copyright holder, and you infringed their rights. For the last item you may face an obligation to disclose certain evidence as per §§ 101 ff. UrhG. The plaintiff can actually simply claim anything; until you dispute their claims it is believed to be true, § 138 Ⅲ, 288 ZPO. Yet still, lying about hard facts is forbidden, § 138 Ⅰ ZPO (Wahrheitspflicht). Claiming the work’s creator was alive in 1952 even though they very well know he was not is illegal. On the other hand since you are relying on §§ 64/65 Ⅰ, 129 Ⅰ 1 UrhG, that is the circumstance copyright has expired 70 complete calendar years after the (last co)author’s death, § 69 UrhG, you will need to contest any claim copyright did not expire (subjektive Behauptungslast). No copyright protection → no damages. Otherwise it is believed there was no issue about this. The plaintiff will then again need to produce evidence that copyright has not expired. It is the plaintiff who seeks damages under § 97 Ⅱ 1 UrhG so they have the burden of proof regarding all requirements of this legal basis.
Physical content The main consideration with physical content is that reading it does not require making a copy, so uncomplicated copyright law is what’s relevant. Copyright law is about making copies (also distributing). Purchase a novel (a physical book which was legally obtained). There is no copying involved (you do not in fact make a copy in your mind, if you're a human). Under the First Sale doctrine, once a copy is sold by the rights-holder (e.g. the publisher, initially to the bookstore or distributor), that owner can do whatever it wants with that specific copy, including reading or re-selling (and anying thereafter can likewise). Books are sold, not licensed. Copyright relates to copying, not reading. It’s true that all (legal) rights are reserved, but the power to prevent resale is not a right. Book (or anything else) on the ground. As above, with the complication that you aren’t at least immediately the rightful owner. But, you don’t have to be the owner of a protected work to read it (otherwise libraries would not exist). The rightful owner might unsuccessfully try to sue you for reading their property, but reading does not cause damage, and your act is innocent (not even negligent), and not wrongful. Eventually (depending on jurisdiction) you may become the owner if the original owner does not reclaim the book. Reading a copy made by someone else. See above about the relationship between reading and copyright. The teacher might maybe be liable for infringement, but you are not culpable (assuming you didn’t encourage the teacher to make an illegal copy). Digital content However, every item of digital content has to be copied many times, in order to actually be read. E.g. a copy is made to video display memory from RAM, which is copied some number of times from RAM to RAM as the program formats and sizes, ultimately reading a copy stored on disk storage (which is installed from.... using N temp files) Typically what happens is that you acquire a copy of a license to use the content. Some number of copies may be statutorily permitted, e.g. the myriad transitory copies created across the internet as you download the work, or on your computer as you install it. The law addresses this matter in part at 17 USC 117, saying that it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful. Since Congress chose the word “program” rather than “file”, the plain reading of this is that permission is always required to read digital content. One may assume, when you purchase an electronic book at the store (you thus own the recording medium), that the work also comes with specific permission to make those automatic copies required to actually read the book on a computer. In order to read the book you must make some number of copies. Seeing stuff on a web page. Let’s also assume that the material is on the page without permission, but you don’t know that, and it just jumps out at you. This raises an interesting question regarding statutory language and web pages. The statutory language is not at all clear about link-clicking (the statutes don't say anything about "links"), and I don't know of any relevant case law (probably because it would be ludicrous to go after an innocent link-clicker) Infringement is defined in 17 USC 501(a): Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122 or of the author as provided in section 106A(a), or who imports copies or phonorecords into the United States in violation of section 602, is an infringer of the copyright and if you infringe, you may be liable. 17 USC 106 spells out those rights: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords; … (3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending; … When you go to a web page and click a link, are you reproducing the protected material? Or is the website owner reproducing the material, and pushing it onto you? I don’t know of any decisions that address this kind of technical question. There is no question that the person hosting the infringing material is liable, the question is whether you would be as well? It would be highly unjust to hold the innocent link-clicker responsible. There is a bit of protection for innocent infringement in 17 USC 405(b) Any person who innocently infringes a copyright, in reliance upon an authorized copy or phonorecord from which the copyright notice has been omitted and which was publicly distributed by authority of the copyright owner before the effective date of the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, incurs no liability for actual or statutory damages under section 504 for any infringing acts committed before receiving actual notice that registration for the work has been made under section 408, if such person proves that he or she was misled by the omission of notice. In a suit for infringement in such a case the court may allow or disallow recovery of any of the infringer’s profits attributable to the infringement, and may enjoin the continuation of the infringing undertaking or may require, as a condition for permitting the continuation of the infringing undertaking, that the infringer pay the copyright owner a reasonable license fee in an amount and on terms fixed by the court. (c) Protection under this title is not affected by the removal, destruction, or obliteration of the notice, without the authorization of the copyright owner, from any publicly distributed copies or phonorecords. (You could be prevented from further use of the infringing material, and liable for specific lost profit). Infringement is not defined in terms of what you know or believe about the copyright status of work. Nevertheless, I would expect that in addressing the question of whether a person had in fact made a copy that they would look at the mental state of the individual, looking for mens rea. This could distinguish clicking a link that unexpectedly pushes protected material onto you, versus attempting to obtain protected material by clicking on a link.
The code is copyrighted. You are not given any permission to use or copy any part of it, nor to create a derivative work based on it. There is no way for you to "make the copyright null". The code was copyrighted in 2005, and the copyright will not expire until 70 years after the death of the author, under US law. The period would vary in some other countries, but in no country that I know of will it expire in the next few years. That the author is dead, or the publisher out of business, does not change this legally. Someone, probably the author's heir, or perhaps whoever bought the remains of the publisher's business, will own the copyright. However, the ideas and programming techniques shown and discussed in the book are not protected, and you may use them freely to write programs, commercial or non-commercial. You need not even acknowledge the book as a source of ideas, although to do so would be nice. Of course, since the author is dead and the publisher not active, if you were to infringe the copyright by copying code from thsi book, there is a reasonable chance that no one would notice, but if someone did notice, the current owner of the copyright could sue you for infringement, and could perhaps win sizable damages. It would be safer to write your own original code using only the general ideas from the book. In future, do not ever assume that you can just take someone else's code (or other creative work, such as a book) and reuse it without permission, unless it is in the public domain, for example because it was published before 1923.
Copyright law is a country-by-country matter. Most countries are signatories to the Berne Convention, which provides a common framework, but there are still variations, generally in the duration of copyright or the definition of copyrightable material. According to the Hirtle chart, a video game that was first published in Europe in the year 2000 and subsequently published in the United States is still copyrighted in both the United States and whichever European countries it was published in. It is likely to be a work of corporate authorship, so the US copyright will expire on January 1, 2096 (unless a law extending the duration is passed). In the United States, the requirement to register a copyright was eliminated in 1989 as part of the Berne Convention Implementation Act; registration still provides benefits when filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Most European countries eliminated their registration requirements much earlier, if they had them at all: the Berne Convention dates from 1887. Copyright does not simply cease to exist when the owner does, or if the owner cannot be determined. The difficulty of tracking down copyright holders for old or little-known works is the driving force behind orphaned works legislation. There are no orphaned works laws in the United States, and since copyright is country-by-country, European laws won't help you if you're interested in publishing in the US. In order to track down the copyright holder, you'll need to figure out who originally held the copyright (probably the publisher, but it could be either development company, or both, or the game might be a collective work of the individuals who worked on it). If it was a work of corporate authorship, and none of the game-copyright sales mention it, copyright will have been transfered when the company owning the copyright was sold (as part of a general "and all intellectual property" clause).
Copyright protection exists for any work (picture, paragraph, song etc), and persists for many years until it expires. Unless the work was created a long time ago, or was created by the US government (not the same as &quot;funded by government money&quot;), you should assume that the work is protected. That means that you must have permission to copy it. Sometimes, a work has associated with it some such permission, in the form of a &quot;license&quot;. Without such a license, you have to request the copyright owner for permission to copy – whether or not they say that the work is protected by copyright (because by law it is protected, so they don't have to say that it is). If you request permission to copy, and do not receive the required permission, then you cannot legally copy the work. The copyright holder has no obligation to explicitly deny permission. You can certainly list the URL for an image, you just cannot copy the image in your book.
But while some libraries allow unrestricted use of their Public Domain content, others do not and limit the use of their copies to Non-Commercial use. It is my understanding that NC only applies to the digital copy, not the work itself. Your understanding is correct. An ancient text, or one long out of copyright, does not get new protection by creating an image of the text. At most the image itself is protected, not the underlying text. In the US, and other jurisdictiosn that follow the rule of the 1999 Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp case there is no copyright protection on the image because it has no original content. Some EU courts have indicated that they will be following the logic of bridgeman. To the best of my knowledge no EU decision grants copyright protection to an otherwise out-of-copyright work because of its presence in a digital library or collection. However, if a person gained access to a digital library or collection subject to a TOS agreement which includes &quot;no commercial use&quot; terms and then published a text from it commercially, that person might be subject to a breech of contract or similar suit by the library. Such a suit would need to include proof of damages.
Derivative work The Kenku first appeared in Dungeon Magazine 27 in 1991 and appears to be an original work as far as I can tell. It, therefore, enjoys copyright protection until 70 years after the author dies - it seems unlikely that the author died before 1950 so the copyright has probably not expired, AFAIK, the author is, in fact, still alive. Your usage is what is known as a derivative work and making derivative works is one of the rights that copyright grants to the copyright holder. You can't do it without permission unless you have a fair use defence: you don't. If you call your Kenku a duck; it's still a Kenku This is the inverse of the well-known duck test much beloved of philosophers and employment-law judges but equally relevant to copyright-law judges. Changing one (or several or even many) aspects of a copyrighted work is still copyright infringement. You are free to write something inspired by the Kenku but once "it looks like a Kenku, swims like a Kenku, and quacks like a Kenku, then it probably is a Kenku".
While the 12th century original is in the public domain, that translation was, if I am correct, published in 1996 and is protected by copyright. You will not be able to use extensive quotations without permission from the copyright holders. If you are in the US, you could probably use limited quotations under Fair Use. Exactly how much could be used depends on the specific facts -- there is no general rule. If your use would be likely to harm the market for the translation or to replace it, that would weigh against a finding of Fair Use, but there are four factors and they must all be considered. Note that fair use is a very specifically US concept, and will not apply elsewhere.