IP law governing physical, functional things Are patents the only type of IP right that applies to physical, functional things, or can copyright and trademark also apply? For example, say a third party wants to manufacture and sell a purely functional part of a car, like part of the engine, not something like a badge or hood ornament that's likely trademarked. If the part is not covered by a patent, are they in the clear? Or could some other type of IP right apply to, say, a bolt hole pattern?
Copyright and trademark are limited by the functionality doctrine which is the legal principle that denies trademark and copyright the ability to restrict the reproduction of purely functional features. 17 U.S.C. §101 defines the notion of a "useful article": A "useful article" is an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information. 17 U.S.C §103(b) limits the applicability of copyright on useful articles: This title does not afford, to the owner of copyright in a work that portrays a useful article as such, any greater or lesser rights with respect to the making, distribution, or display of the useful article so portrayed than those afforded to such works under the law... In other words, you cannot stop someone from making and distributing a useful article merely because you have previously expressed the useful article in a copyrighted work. For trademark, the most significant court case is TrafFix Devices, Inc. v. Marketing Displays, Inc., which held that trademark cannot restrict distribution of functional components. The plaintiff in that case claimed that their product's spring mechanism was legally protected as a visually distinctive part of their product's trade dress, but the Supreme Court held that the spring mechanism was ineligible for trademark protection insofar as it was a functional component of the product.
You own it In general, if you own an object, you can do what you like with it if you otherwise comply with the law. It is possible that a particular object may be protected under heritage or similar law, but if it isn’t, and you comply with environmental and safety law, you grind that thing into dust if you want to. Of course, if it did, you would never be able to delete a voicemail, email, or throw out used notepaper - they’re all copyright.
The general rule under united-states law is that copyright is infringed when a copyrighted work, or any part of it, is copied or distributed without permission, or a new derivative work based on the copyrighted work is created or distributed without permission. There are several exceptions to this. There is, for example, a specific right to create a backup of a computer program to which one has lawful access. The best known and widest exception to copyright in US law is &quot;fair use&quot;. What use is a fair use is a highly fact-driven question: It cannot be answered in general, except by quoting the statutory provisions. There are no exact rules for what is and is not fair use that apply in all cases. There have been several detailed discussions of fair-use on this site, including https://law.stackexchange.com/a/66608/17500 not long ago. Note that fair use is a strictly US concept, and does not apply under any other country's law. Other countries have their own exceptions to copyright, which will cover some of the same cases as fair use, but not all of them, and will get to results by different routes. If hashes were distributed separately, to confirm the authenticity of a program, they would probably not be protected by copyright for lack of originality. Under US law, and particularly the Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) case there must be a &quot;minimal degree&quot; of creativity for something to be protected by copyright. The decision said: Many compilations consist of nothing but raw data—i.e. wholly factual information not accompanied by any original expression. On what basis may one claim a copyright upon such work? Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place. ... The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable: The sine qua non of copyright is originality. Since a hash or other digital signature can be computed automatically from the document to be signed (indeed that is its value), it is not creative and copying a hash alone would not be an infringement. Whether this would be true of other metadata depends on the exact nature of that data, and the degree of creativity that it represents. Without specific facts no judgement can be made, and making that kind of very specific judgement might be beyond the scope of this site. A comment said: Just because a work is copyrighted, doesn't mean every part of that work is copyrighted, ... I would put it that every part of a work is copyrighted, but some copying does not amount to infringement. Extracting facts and rewording them so that none of the expression is copied is not infringement. Extracting a completely non-creative part of a work and reproducing it is not infringement. Copying a limited amount for use in a review or commentary is often fair use, and fair use is not infringement. Video Games There is nothing in US law specific to video games. There is little that is specific to computer software, although the right to make a backup copy is protected. A good deal of case law has focused on the issue of temporary copies made while running a program, which does not seem relevant to this question. Other cases have focused on the protectability of user interfaces, and of APIs, also not relevant here. whether a work is packaged as a single file or as many related files should not affect its copyright protection. (I know of no case on that specific issue.) Whether copying a part of acomputer file is infringement or not would depend on the purpose of the copying, and on the effect or potential effect on the copyright holder, and perhaps on other factors. Copying a non-creative hash, as a way of detecting whether a file is modified or not, does not seem likely to be infringement, unless the holder could show harm, but no one knows for sure how a court would rule in such a case. Copyright does not protect facts, but it does protect the way in which facts are expressed, unless there is only one or a few such ways available to express such a fact. Copyright also may protect the selection and arrangement of facts, except where the arrangement is &quot;obvious&quot;. Placing facts in alphabetical order (as in a phone book) or chronological order (as in a timeline) has been held to be obvious and not protected. International Standards The question and a comment ask about international standards for copyright. In effect there are none. The only significant international agreement on copyright is the Berne Copyright Convention. That is a treaty to which almost every nation belongs, thus rendering the Universal Copyright Convention and other international copyright agreements obsolete. But the Berne Convention leaves details to national copyright laws. The making or authorizing of copies, and the authorizing of derivative works are part of copyright in every Bern-compliant country. Berne provides for exceptions to copyright, but leaves the details to national law. Moreover, there is no intentional court in which copyright claims can be made. Anyone wishing to sue for copyright infringement must do so in the courts of some specific country, and so all the case law which defines details on what is and is not infringement is national, not international. It should be noted that a copyright holder may sue in any country where infringing actions have occurred. When an allegedly infringing work is distributed over the web, that often means that a plaintiff may sue in almost any country, although enforcement will be limited if the defendant has no presence and no assets in the chosen country. Thus the copyright laws of multiple countries may be relevant to a particular case.
Exactly the same way it works over all other content There are no special classes of copyright, there’s just copyright. What a user of a service may do with copyright materials will be spelled out in the licence. If there is no licence, then they are left with fair use/fair dealing.
The band's logo can be protected by both copyright and trademark. The band's name is probably only protected as a trademark. Trademark would not apply to your personal use, because to infringe a trademark, you need to "use" the mark, and "use" in trademark law generally means selling an item that has the mark on it. As far as trademark law is concerned, no sale means no infringement. Copyright protects the exclusive right of the owner to copy a "work" (it's much more complex than that, but we don't need to get into the details here). Copyright probably applies because you would "copy" the logo, which under copyright law is something only the copyright owner can do (absent authorization from the copyright owner). You would therefore theoretically be infringing copyright by copying the bands logo on a shirt or something you want to wear yourself. That said, while I agree with the first answer that fair use may apply in theory, there would never ever be such a complex discussion about fair use in this case... because in fact there's absolutely no chance an individual would get fined or sued for having copied a band's logo and name on something he/she wants to wear his/herself. Getting sued by the band The band will not notice. If you're lucky enough to meet the band (or somebody close to the band) in person while you are wearing your garment, they would either not notice or not care. At worst, they'll ask you where you bought it in case they suspect you bought it from someone who illegally sells fake merch. Even then, all of this seems very unlikely. If you are extremely unlikely and the band notices it and sues you (and finds a lawyer to take a case like that to court), my inclination is to think the judge would be extremely mad with the band (and its lawyer) for losing the court's time with such a trivial matter. No judge would allow lawyers to waste the court's time pleading such a complex thing as fair use in a case like that. Getting fined The police would not notice either, because the only time the police cares about copyright is when somebody makes a complaint (nobody would make a complaint about you), except when they seize containers full of copyright infringing stuff (that is destined to be illegally sold for profit) in a port or at a border somewhere. The only possible scenario where I could imagine that there would be legal consequences is if you wear a t-shirt with the bands logo in a YouTube video (or in a picture) where the only thing that you see basically is the bands logo on your t-shirt. Even this scenario is extremely far fetched, but let's say the video becomes popular and the band notices. Well, the likeliest scenario is that they would file a DMCA notice and get YouTube to take down the video, with very little chances that there would be more important consequences to you. Have fun!
You would want to establish trademark protection on the phrase "Ball Cube": copyright is not generally a good way to protect names or other short phrases. See, for example, Can I copyright the name of my band? from the U. S. Copyright Office, which notes that "names are not protected by copyright law." Furthermore, you're interested in preventing others from selling a similar object using a similar name, and that's precisely what trademark protection is for. The ball cube design would potentially be eligible for copyright protection, but you should be aware that this protection would not extend to elements of its design that originated in Rubik's Cube, because your design would be a derivative work.
How can I find out whom the intellectual property now belongs to? For the patent, is this possible through the patent office? If it is a patent, the patent office; if it is a copyright, the copyright registrar. You could also look at the return from the auction in the bankruptcy court case file, which would control even if the patent office and copyright registrar records haven't yet been updated. You could also call the person who conducted the auction, or the lawyer who arranged for the auction, to ask. Often they would cooperate in telling you this information since a bankruptcy auction is, by definition, a public sale anyway, and cooperation might help them gain positive referrals from you in the future. If the assignee has not been changed in the patent register, is it possible to reassign the patent to myself, since the company has apparently neglected to do so? No. Doing this would be a form of fraud or embezzlement. The intellectual property became the property of the bankruptcy estate. If the bankruptcy estate is determined to have property not disposed of in the case, you would have to petition the bankruptcy court to have the remaining assets sold for the benefit of the creditors of the estate at fair market value. The Follow Up Questions I'm going to decline to answer the follow up question about how to arrange to purchase intellectual property from someone when you would like to own it, once you determine who the owner is. This is a more general question that applies to lots of circumstances and is as much a question of economics as law. There is an Ask Patents.SE forum, which might be a more appropriate place to ask that question.
I'm going to focus on one part of your question, because I think it is informative to the entire question: "By publishing those data in a copyrighted book are they now in the public domain?" Insofar as copyright is concerned, the "facts" are simply never copyrightable. What is copyrightable is the expression of the fact. So you publish a book and it contains many facts. You retain copyright over how you expressed the facts, meaning the word choice, format of presentation and so on. The discussion of this point always leads people to ask the following two questions: What if the "facts" are closely related to the way they are expressed? For example, a phonebook contains "facts" about phone numbers. The individual numbers are not subject to copyright. But if the way they were organized was clever (i.e. not merely alphabetical) the presentation may be copyrighted. Doesn't that line get blurred? Why doesn't "the presentation order" count as a "fact?" It does get blurred! And courts use nuanced case law and judgment to figure out which side of the line a given thing is. However, one backstop is that if AN EXPRESSION is so closely related to the IDEA BEING EXPRESSED that the IDEA cannot be otherwise expressed, then then the EXPRESSION is not subject to copyright protection. To answer your specific questions: The book is subject to copyright. The facts in the book are not. Someone else could publish a book with the same measurements so long as they are expressing the facts with sufficient difference from the original. I'm not familiar with CUSIP numbers. However, there are two things to say here. (A) it sounds like you are describing a contractual relationship between the people who have the numbers. This is not governed by copyright; it is governed by contract between the parties. If these numbers could be treated as a "trade secret" they might be protected IP in that way. But given that they are likely circulated at least a bit, they don't seem like candidates for "trade secret" protection. To your question, "what is the effect of one person leaking?" If "trade secret" law was doing any "work" here... then yes, the trade secret would be undone once the information was public. But like I said, its likely this is actually all about contracts not intellectual property protection. (B) The "facts" of "which number is associated with which instrument" is likely NOT subject to copyright at any time. The specific numbering code COULD BE copyrighted, but in reality is almost certainly TOO CLOSELY tied to the IDEA being expressed to be copyrighted. Could the number be expressed otherwise? If not, then its likely not protected by copyright. -- Big take away here: You seem to be confused about the concept of "facts" getting into the public domain. That's not exactly what copyright is about. Copyright would protect the expression of facts. An expression can become public domain if it is sufficiently old or if the creator designates it as public domain work. But simply "putting something out there" does nothing to alter the copyright status of the thing.