Can Google legally host images for its search results without permission? Google crawls websites, and downloads the images to their servers along with the related metadata. These images are then presented to the user when searching Google for related images. If the owner has a copyright notice up on the website, how can Google legally host this image copy without permission? Would the content owner be able to claim damages for loss of profit due to lost advertising views? All in a theoretical sense; I'm just interested.
See Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.. The use of image thumbnails as part of a search engine is transformative and fair use.
The answer depends in part what venue you're talking about, e.g. Reddit, Facebook etc. The details are revealed somewhere in the Terms of Service for that venue. The general pattern is that you are allowed to use that venue, provides you grant permission for the service to do what they do with your content. You cannot legally send them a take-down notice for your stuff, because a take-down notice requires you to say that the stuff was posted without your permission (and that is false – and you can be punished for making that statement). There could be a venue where they do not hold you to an irrevocable license, in which case you could revoke that permission (but not Reddit: you granted them a "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so"). I've seen a site that actually asserts ownership of user-contributed content (I don't know if their TOS ended up being litigated) – if is not at all hard to write a TOS that includes transfer of copyright, rather than granting of a license. The only hard parts are (1) figuring out what you want in terms of permission to use and (2) whether your answer to (1) means nobody will use your service. SE and Reddit TOS probably are as close as you need to get for what you describe.
united-states Facts are not copyrightable. Assuming Scrapehero collected these facts in a legal manner and assuming the source of these facts does not contain copyrighted (protected) material, then selling such a collection may be legal. Of particular relevance is Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co.. Here, Feist Publications copied Rural's phone directory into Feist's own phone directory. The supreme court found that Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and thus not protected. Of course, this cuts both ways. Assuming Scrapehero did not inject creativity into the data, nothing stops a recipient of such data from distributing it themselves. In practice, this probably isn't a concern for Scrapehero. This answer is US-specific. Some countries recognize Database Rights, which may prevent such activity.
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.
You need permission to copy unless fair use applies Does this mean that when someone sends you their resume, it is unlawful to pass it on to others unless the author gives permission? First note that copyright law only applies to copying. If someone were to give you a physical copy of their resume (assuming such a thing would happen in this day and age) then giving this to someone else without copying it is not copyright violation. There may be privacy issues involved but that’s another issue. Further, in the United States, there is a fair use doctrine which allows limited copying without permission in certain circumstances. This is likely to apply in a lot of situations around copying resumes. Finally, permission does not have to be explicit. For example, if you receive a resume in the course of a job application then permission to make copies for that purpose can be assumed to have been implicitly given. Can you get sued if the resume finds its way to someone the author did not intend to see it, and the author suffers some harm as a result? Under privacy law, possibly. Under copyright law, no. What you can be sued for is making a copy. It doesn’t matter where this ends up. Is distributing a resume in the context of professional networking considered as implicit consent to allow sharing with anyone under the US legal system? No. It’s explicit consent because those networking sites have Terms and Conditions that explicitly deal with copyright. For example, if you post your resume on LinkedIn, you agree to this.
http://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/dk/dk091en.pdf is the Copyright Law in English for Denmark. You should probably try to find a Danish version to ensure the translation is accurate. Chapter 2 lists the exemptions from the general rule that you need the copyright owner's permission to use their IP. Unfortunately, the usage you have made does not meet the requirements for private use (s12): digital copies may only be shared among the members of one household, placing them on the web extends beyond your household. It may meet the requirements of educational use (s13) providing that your school has met the requirements for Extended Collective Use (s50). For photographs, this seems unlikely, such arrangements are usually limited to songs and television works. Under Chapter 6b, you are permitted to use "orphaned works", however, this requires that you have made a diligent search for the owners and have been unable to either identify or locate them. Copyright violation is subject to both penal sanctions (fines and in egregious violations imprisonment) (s76) and damages (s83). TL;DR Yes, you could be sued. Yes, the copyright holder would probably be successful. No, it is extremely unlikely they would bother.
Yes, you can. An excellent example is this very website - at the bottom of this page you will find a series of links in the footer, one of which is &quot;Terms of Service&quot;. I think you will agree that most people using the Law SE are making no money from it or paying no money to use it and yet the terms of service sets out in black and white what a user of this site can do, and what the repercussions can be if they breach the ToS, so it serves a purpose as an excellent example for your question.
You can't, in general, know whether a distributor of a work has permission to distribute, or is a pirate site. I verified that they have posted an illegal copy of a work that I created, and I know that I did not grant permission to them (or anyone) to infringe my copyright. Both hosting and downloading works without permission is a violation of copyright law, so both parties are liable. Downloaders may erroneously rely on the "I didn't know!" defense, which in the US carries no legal weight. Even so, if you download my book, it will probably cost me vastly more to sue you for infringement than the damages that I might be awarded over your infringement. Usually, copyright holders go after the pirate sites, and only rarely go after particularly egregious serial downloaders.