Social media posts ownership: US Copyright Office The US Copyright Office recently introduced in August 2020 the option of copyrighting &quot;short online literary works such as blog entries, social media posts, and short online articles&quot; https://www.copyright.gov/grtx/ Suppose that there are two parties A and B where each party separately owns a website that publishes blog posts and news stories. Suppose that A first publishes a story but does not copyright the story with US Copyright Office. Then B plagiarizes the story but actually registers a copyright with the Copyright Office. Then legally speaking, who actually owns the original post? Does B hold legal ownership even though it is plagiarized?
In the US, copyright is granted automatically when content is created, so party A owns the copyright to the work. Party B has filed a fraudulent copyright registration, attempting to claim ownership of a work they did not create and do not own. This does not give them ownership rights to the work. Party A may need to go to court to prove their ownership of the work and have the copyright office issue a cancellation of copyright registration, since party B should not be the registered copyright holder of the work. In theory, one cannot register a copyright they do not own in the first place, and B's fraudulent registration does not somehow grant them legal rights to the original work. Of course, this will be a matter for the courts to decide.
First I should point out that the Google question is about a different situation, the "snippet" issue where a tiny part of a web page is redistributed, where the issue of resolved in the US by appeal to the "fair use" defense. The proposed scenario as written here is broader since it would go beyond a couple of lines, and goes up to the limit of copy an entire web page. That is copyright infringement, with or without an associated link. Copyright protection is not just about attribution, it is about control. If you can limit your copying appropriately, you may survive under a fair use analysis; but you need to hire a lawyer with experience in copyright litigation to vet your notions of what is "a small amount" etc.
It depends on where you are For example, in USA copyright exists in a literary or artistic work stored in permanent form like a book, a movie, an audio recording, a building etc. In contrast, in Australia there is no requirement for the work to be stored - that means copyright can exist in a spoken lecture. The owner of the copyright (usually, but not necessarily the creator) has the right to choose if and how their work is copied and if and how any derivative works may be made from it. For your example, the book is an original work in which copyright vests with the author(s), your notes are a derivative work in which copyright vests in you. However, you presumably did not have permission to make your derivative work so that makes it prima facie a copyright infringement. Fortunately, in the USA there exists a Fair Use defence and in Commonwealth countries the slightly less permissive Fair Dealing defence (if you are somewhere else you will need to do your own research). Search this site or read the copyright article on Wikipedia to learn about these defences. Long answer short (too late!), taking notes to aid your own study is almost certainly Fair Use/Dealing. So is sharing it with your friends. Publishing it may or may not be depending on all sorts of factors; for example, if you were to write a study guide for say a Harry Potter book for use by English literature students this is probably OK even if it is a for profit activity, because criticism is Fair Use/Dealing. Citing work is not necessary to comply with copyright law. Failing to cite may be academic misconduct but that is not a legal matter; its a matter for your academic institution.
First, copyright means that permission from the author is generally required. The courts find three sorts of such permission: direct author-to-recipient explicit licensing (typical in the case of a book author to publisher relation), indirect licensing arising from platform usage (in using Stackexchange, you probably unknowingly click-agreed to allow me and everybody else to copy and redistribute your creations), and implicit licensing – where permission to use is reasonably inferrable, though not explicitly stated. Since the latter doesn't involve written-out statements of the conditions under which you are licensed to copy text, the courts don't rely heavily on implicit licensing. But implicit licensing is what makes it possible to legally read a web page without first signing an agreement. If we assume in your scenario that the author is fully aware that their responses are automatically distributed to various servers, then even in lieu of a platform license, an implicit license can be found. Second, irrespective of the desideratum of having permission, one is in the US allowed to copy without permission, for certain purposes known as &quot;fair use&quot;. This is a complicated area of legal analysis, where one has to weigh factors such as whether the content is artistic vs. factual, whether your use simply re-propagates vs. makes a comment, whether the use is for profit vs. free and educational, and whether the use has a negative effect on the market for the original work.
Quoting content may or may not constitute copyright infringement, depending on the various factors that go into the fair use defense. Short quotes which are made for the purpose of discussion, research and commentary and not for copy would be squarely in the domain of "fair use" under US law. That means that the copyright owner would not succeed in suing you for quoting them: under the statutory mechanism for recognizing his right to his intellectual product, there is a limit on how much control he can exert over your behavior (since the two of you have not worked out some kind of agreement -- copyright law creates rights even when there is no contract). As for Facebook, you have a contract with them, embodied in the terms of service. You have been given permission to access material that they host (permission is required, under copyright law), and their permission is conditional. It says "you may access stuff on our platform only as long as you do X": if that includes a clause "don't be nasty", then that limits your right to speak freely and be as nasty as you'd like. If it says "don't quote even a little", that means you cannot quote even a little, even when you would have the statutory right to quote a little (or, to be nasty). Fair use would mean that you can't be sued for copyright infringement of the stuff that you quoted a little of. You can, however, be expelled from Facebook. You probably cannot be sued for "accessing Facebook without permission". There is a federal law against unauthorized access of computer networks, and there was a failed attempt to construe violation of a TOS as "unauthorized access" – it isn't. But accessing Facebook necessarily involves copying (that's how computers work), and there is no "fair use" defense whereby everybody has a fair use right to access Facebook. Theoretically you could be sued for copyright infringement, for accessing Facebook's intellectual property without permission. Also, Facebook can rescind your permission to access their content (see this case), and once you have been banned, it is a crime to further access their network. This assumes that there is no overriding limit on contracts that would nullify a no-quoting condition. There is no such limit on contracts in the US, so such a contract would be enforceable. There is also nothing illegal (unenforceable) about a TOS which prohibits automated methods of access.
Can a person be held liable for copyright infringement for sharing a meme on social media? Yes, unless some other exception applies. There is no specific exemption from copyright law for sharing a meme on social media. Generally speaking, since sharing a meme on social media involves publishing the entire work to everyone in the world with Internet access, &quot;fair use&quot; is not a very strong defense to a copyright infringement claim in this context. A more viable defense is the doctrine of &quot;implied license&quot; which is the idea that the original person to post a meme on the Internet did so with the implied intent that it be shared widely without a further grant of permission. For this reason, copyright disputes rarely arise from the sharing of a meme on social media. But if the original person to post a meme on the Internet did so without permission of the owner of the copyright to the meme, it is an infringement of the copyright of the meme to share it on social media. This is true even if sharing the meme on social media is merely an innocent infringement made in the good faith belief that it was being shared with the permission of the copyright owner. A claim of innocent infringement status for someone infringing a copyright by sharing a meme on social media is supported by Terms of Service for social media sites that turn over copyright to posted material to the social media provider (with an express right to share it on the site) in cases where the material is provided by the author of or owner of the meme for copyright purposes. Also, another Terms of Service states that users promise not to post copyright infringing materials on the site without permission to do so. Both of these terms of service provisions are ubiquitous on social media sites. But, innocent infringers are still subject to lawsuits for money damages for copyright infringement, just not with all of the same remedies as in cases of intentional copyright infringement. Social media sites themselves are immune from copyright infringement liability under Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) under U.S. law (where most social media firms are based), however, so long as they comply with takedown notices in the manner provided by the DMCA. Usually, if a copyright infringing meme is taken down by a social media site, the copyright owner will not pursue other users of the site who innocently infringed their copyright by sharing a meme posted by someone else, although the law does not require them to do so. What is international law on it? Copyright law primarily arises under the domestic laws of a country. There are some treaties such as the Berne Convention that seek to standardize copyright law internationally, which many, but not all countries, have adopted. But, in every case, analysis of the specific instance of sharing a meme on social media is not specifically addressed by international treaties, in part, because the practice did not exist when the vast majority of these treaties were entered into by the countries that are parties to them. Facebook, for example, didn't come into existence until October 28, 2003, and the widespread practice of sharing memes on social media is more recent than that.
You can do whatever you like with posts made after you change the rules - you have to leave the previous stuff alone. The contributors' have accepted the terms of the licence: They own the copyright or have permission from the copyright holder to post it (the promise) They agree that it can be edited altered or removed CC-BY-SA allows people to copy the stuff off the website and republish it - this is way outside what the contributors agreed to. These people have given permission for their work to be altered but not copied.
A copyright can be divided into as many pieces as the owners choose. Initially, all authors have a share m(an equal share unless they have an agreement on some other share arrangement), But each author (or later owner) can leave the copyright to multiple heirs, in equal or unequal shares. Each owner can sell all or part of the copyright (or usage rights) to one or more new owners. Under US law, any co-owner may permit a copy (or copies) to be made, or may grant a non-exclusive license. However, the co-owner doing this must account to the other co-owners for any profits made, and share them according to whatever agreement the co-owners may have (by share if there is no other agreement). But to grant an exclusive license, all co-owners must agree. The law in many other countries is different. In some countries, a majority of owners (by share usually) must agree to grant even a non-exclusive license. The co-owners may make an agreement to limit granting of licenses to some particular owner or representative or to require wider consent than a single co-owner.