Do you have to give attribution if an image falls under Creative Commons? Do you have to give attribution if an image falls under Creative Commons? Let's say you're sharing it on social media and you're not getting money out of it. Is it fair use even if you don't credit the author of the image? It seems crazy to me that you would have to give credits for some image especially if you're just sharing those images for fun.
It seems crazy to me that you would have to give credits for some image especially if you're just sharing those images for fun. It seems crazy to me that anyone would think you can just use someone else's image without giving them credit. I mean, it's not really a good idea to assume that if you see something you want, you can just take it. But anyway, back to the point: in order to share an image on social media, (1) you have to make a copy of it, (2) you have to give (&quot;distribute&quot;) that copy to the social media website, and (3) they have to make and distribute copies of it in order for anyone else to see it. In the US or countries with similar copyright laws, the right to make copies of a creative work - like an image - is reserved to the copyright holder, which is often the person or company that created the work in the first place. Same with the right to distribute copies. So based on that part of the law alone, all three steps I mentioned above would be illegal, and if that were all there were to it, it would be flat-out illegal to share images on social media. However, there are two ways to get around this. One is to have the copyright holder give you permission to (1) make copies of the work, (2) distribute those copies, and (3) legally give other people the right to make and distribute copies of their own. The typical way to do this is with a license, such as the Creative Commons licenses. For example, the CC-BY-ND 4.0 license says this: Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to: reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part; and produce and reproduce, but not Share, Adapted Material. In your case, what that means is that the copyright holder for the image (&quot;Licensor&quot;) grants &quot;You&quot;, the person who downloaded or otherwise acquired the image, permission to (1) make copies (&quot;reproduce&quot;) and (2) distribute copies (&quot;Share&quot;) of the image (the &quot;Licensed Material&quot;), as long as you abide by certain conditions (&quot;Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License&quot;). And there's another section that says this: Every recipient of the Licensed Material automatically receives an offer from the Licensor to exercise the Licensed Rights under the terms and conditions of this Public License. which means that the copyright holder (&quot;Licensor&quot;) gives anyone who gets a copy of the image (such as the people you share it with) permission to (3) make and distribute copies of their own, as long as they comply with the same conditions. So there you go: as long as you abide by the conditions, and the social media site abides by the conditions, you have permission to do all three things you need to do to share the image on social media. Now, what are those conditions? There are a few of them but this is the main one for what you're asking: If You Share the Licensed Material, You must: retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material: identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated); a copyright notice; a notice that refers to this Public License; a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties; a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable; indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License. This says that if you share the image, you have to keep the attribution information provided along with the image when you got it. The attribution info might be in the image itself, or it might be part of a web page in which the image is embedded, or something else. Whatever it is, you have to pass it on along with the image in some reasonable way. On social media, that might mean including the attribution info in the same post where you share the image, if it's not already included in the image itself. If you don't, then this part of the license kicks in: However, if You fail to comply with this Public License, then Your rights under this Public License terminate automatically. That means that if you share the image without keeping the attribution information that was there when it was shared with you, then you have lost your right to share the image at all (because, remember, the license was the only thing that allowed you to share the image in the first place; otherwise it would have been illegal to copy or distribute it). So in summary, if an image is under a Creative Commons license, yes you must share the attribution info along with the image. Otherwise it's illegal for you to share the image at all. For completeness, though, I should mention there's another way to get around the sharing of images being illegal. Most countries' copyright laws provide limited exceptions where you can copy and distribute something you otherwise wouldn't be able to in order to enable education, research, journalism, critical analysis, and that sort of thing. In the US, the factors that go into determining whether this exception applies are how you're using the copyrighted work (in your case, the image) - this includes whether you're trying to make money off it the nature of the work, such as how creative it is how much of the work you're using whether and how your use affects the market for the original And although the details vary widely in other countries, many of them also use some of the same or similar criteria. This is one way that the fact that you're not making money from sharing the image could conceivably push it toward being okay, although you don't necessarily get a free pass to share the image just because you're not making money from it. Because the laws vary so much from country to country, and the circumstances vary so much from case to case, it's impossible to say in general whether attribution is really required when you're taking advantage of this exception. Even if it's not mentioned directly in the law, it might be among the relevant pieces of information taken into account by a court in any particular case. However, I have a hard time imagining how including attribution could hurt this kind of case, so my guess would be that even someone who intends to rely on this exception to copyright law is better off keeping attribution information intact.
Attribution is not a legal requirement If company A owns IP (copyright and trademarks in this case), they can licence it to company N on whatever terms are mutually acceptable. They may require company N to attribute their IP or they may not.
All artistic and literary work has copyright at the moment of creation This includes things “built” in Minecraft. However, under the terms of the Minecraft licence you give a wide ranging copyright licence to Mojang: If you make any content available on or through our Game, you agree to give us permission to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, and publicly display that content. This permission is irrevocable, and you also agree to let us permit other people to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, and publicly display your content. You are not giving up your ownership rights in your content, you are just giving us and other users permission to use it.
You are in breach of Copyright. Plain and simple. Certain websites allow you to use the website content as long as a link is made, but the website must clearly state that. You may also use a tiny portion of the content if it falls under Fair Use, where "Fair Use" does not mean "I want to". The best thing to do is not to do it. You can't copy anybody's work without consent. If you're thinking about Google specifically then they offer multiple APIs so that you can use their content in a wide variety of ways.
It is certainly possible to transfer a copyright or other IP without an explicit charge, indeed it can be a pure gift, and normally would be when it is left by will, as is common enough. From a paid consultant it might be clearer to include a statement that the transfer is part of the consulting assignment, rather than putting a price of zero in a blank. But one could instead convey a permanent non-exclusive license, granting permission to use or modify the work in any way desired, ans saying that this is provided as part of the consulting process. Then there would be no question of what rights the consultant retained, or that the same or a very similar solution could be provided to different clients. Indeed such a license would not be so very different from a CC-BY license, or any of several open source licenses, although I would not use one of those by name. But the legal effect would be much the same, and the wording could be similar. Otherwise there could be a later claim that the right transferred precluded the consultant from using the same solution for other clients. Even if such a claim was not legally sound, and was not upheld, it could be a distraction and costly of time and energy at least.
You are creating a derivative work. You are only allowed to do this if the library comes with a license that allows this. If you want to give your derivative work to anyone else, copying it is copyright infringement unless the license allows it. Copying the derivative work and attaching a different license is most likely to be copyright infringement. And if people receive a copy with an open source license that is not justified and rely on it, that’s creating one unholy legal mess for everyone involved and can be massively more expensive than plain copyright infringement. No license means you don’t have permission to do anything with it, not creating derivative work, not distributing it, and certainly not publish it with an open source license.
I agree that you have a very strong copyright fair use case. Although the logo is creative and you're using the entire thing, your use is for a nonprofit educational purpose and does not affect the value of the work. The logo is also probably trademarked. But you aren't using the mark in commerce, so I don't think that will be a problem for you.
Whoever "derived" the illegal derivative work most likely has copyright in his derivations, unless they are not worth copyright protections. Say I take the Harry Potter books and add a few chapters and try to sell it - that's copyright infringement of course, but I have the copyright on these additional chapters. However, I don't have the right to allow you to copy the derived work. And even if you have the right to copy the original work, you don't have the right to copy the derived work because it is a different work. I could extract my changes, and allow you to take them and do with them what you like. You could then create an illegally derived work yourself. I couldn't sue you, but the original copyright holder could. To the comments: One, a work and a derivative of the work are not the same, so even if you have the right to make a copy of a work, that doesn’t give you any right whatsoever to copy a derivative work - they are not the same work. Two, the copyright holder has the exclusive right to control copying and the creation of derivative works. If the copyright holder doesn’t want derivatives to exist, then creating them, copying them etc. is always copyright infringement.