Copyright Enforcement of Specification Sheets For the sake of keeping this question focused, I am limiting the subject matter to technical data sheets. More so, to electronic component data sheets. I.e. for such components as resistors, capacitors integrated circuits, connectors, etc. Commercial electronic component distributors such as DigiKey, Mouser, Arrow, etc. offer 100's of thousands of these for the myriad of components they sell. Most often they are in the form of a viewable or downloadable PDF. These &quot;data sheets&quot; or &quot;specs&quot; list all of the technical particulars of the components such as physical size and electrical characteristics, as well as providing lots of advice on how to use the component in a product you might be designing. The data sheets are created by the individual manufacturers of the components which are sold by the on-line distributors. Virtually every such component has such a data sheet. These can range in length from a few pages to hundreds of pages. My question is: are these data sheets protected by US copyright law? Could I, hypothetically, copy 10,000 of these to my own website and offer them to the general public for free? My question is NOT how to go about getting permission from the manufacturers (corporate authors). Rather, my question is do the component manufacturers have any legal ability to prevent and remedy such mass copying? Knowing full well that such legal questions generally generate a lot of hypothetical, provisional and tentative answers, my further question is has there ever been a specific legal case decided on this specific copyright or IP issue?
Yes, they are protected by copyright They are literary works: According to 17 USCS § 101 &quot;Literary works&quot; are works, other than audiovisual works, expressed in words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols or indicia, regardless of the nature of the material objects, such as books, periodicals, manuscripts, phonorecords, film, tapes, disks, or cards, in which they are embodied. The copyright owner (in this case the component manufacturer) has the sole right to make or authorize copies (among other rights). Whether the choose to enfore those rights is up to them; they are not obliged to do so.
It is not possible to say that this is generally fair use, although sometimes it would be. A copy for personal use is still a copyright right violation on its face, and fair use does not categorically exclude non-commercial or personal use of copyrighted works. It is a highly fact specific inquiry. The likelihood of anyone discovering that you have done so and deciding to sue over it is slight, but that doesn't mean that there isn't potential copyright infringement liability. Compare this to speeding. People do it all the time, and even driving one mile per hour above the speed limit is still a traffic violation. But it is rare for less serious violations to be ticketed.
Under US law, the use of the converter is irrelevant. The legal situation would be the same if they were posted in MP3 format, or downloaded and played in whatever format they are posted in. The point is making and distributing copies without permission. The first question is: Is the music protected by copyright at all? If the work is old enough, there is no copyright on the composition. For example, most works of classical music will be long out of copyright. However, the recording itself can be copyrighted, even if the composition is not. In general, if recording was published before 1972, it will not be protected by US copyright. There are some other edge cases where the the recording will not be protected. See This chart for details. Assuming the recording is protected, the second question is: is the posting legal? That is, was the music posted by or with the permission of the copyright holder? If not, any download or further use would be copyright infringement, although holders are unlikely to sue individuals who download for personal use only. If the posting of a protected work was legal, the key question is, did the user have permission or some other legal basis. It is generally considered that when music (or other content) is posted to the net, there is an implied permission to download it for personal use. Alternatively and to the same effect, this might be considered in US law to be a case of fair use. But this will stop at personal use. Any making of additional copies, redistribution of such copies, or public performance of the music will require permission from the copyright holder. In the absence of such permission, it will be infringement, and the holder could sue. Permission may be granted directly, by contract, or by a permissive license. But permission in some form is required for such use to be lawful. I should add that the creation and distribution of a new (cover) version of a copyrighted song or other music may be permitted under US law by a compulsory license, known as a &quot;mechanical license&quot;. This is provided for under 17 USC 115. There is a specific procedure to follow, which involves notifying the copyright holder and paying royalties at a specified rate. Failure to follow this procedure, unless permission is obtained in some other way, means that making and distributing recordings (phonorecords) is copyright infringement.
pure functionality is not copyrightable Copyright does not protect purely functional things, it only can protect the execution as Brown Bag Software v Symantec Corp established back in 1992. In fact, even before that, Data East v Epyx established in 1988 that it takes the availability of the software to be copied to even get a case, but that was refined in Capcom v Data East in 1994: There are unprotectable elements, aka Scenes a Faire, things that are just standard and have to be done. A lever that pulls on a rope is strictly functional, that the lever is pink with orange stripes is not. A button with the label &quot;save&quot; on it has no artistic choice but a purely functional one and its presence, in general, can't be copyrighted as that is standard. Even standard placements like &quot;top left corner&quot; or &quot;bottom right corner&quot; for the button are just standard enough and make that part of the UI uncopyrightable. Indeed, even the idea of a Graphic User Interface is unprotectable as Apple v Microsoft (1994) held. But if you put that save button upside down on the left edge of the screen and only visible if you mouse over it, then you have shown artistic choice beyond the mere functionality - but also very bad UI/UX design. Code can be copyrighted. Computer code can be copyright protected, but you protect only those elements that are protectable in the first place. This means only elements that are not for example mandated by the sheer functionality of the underlying programming language. If the programming language mandates that all programs start with Program launch {variable variable variables} then that part is not copyrighted by you, but your choice of variable names can be. Code can be made from functionality requirements There was a famous SCOTUS case that had pretty much this question: Can a company dissect a software and then take the determined functionality of the whole software to their own programming team? Bowers v Baystate court held an Ethical Wall will not constitute infringement, if properly executed and the EULA doesn't prohibit it. Work for hire/Employees Now employers always get pretty much all the rights to a program's code anyway. If you are contracted from the outside, it might be work-for-hire and the contract might include such a transfer. In either case, there are no rights left for the hired person to sue over. Only if the contracted outside coder does not have a work-for-hire type work and there is no transfer clause, they do have rights in the work that they can sue over at all. But Work For Hire is a very complex topic on its own - and requires you to review your contracts and get a lawyer.
Your understanding of the GPL is a bit off. GPLed code doesn't generally force you to GPL the output of the program, but that's just because the output of the program is normally not a derivative work of the program. For instance, if you write a novel in Emacs, your novel is an entirely original work. The fact that you used Emacs as a tool doesn't mean that your novel is somehow based on Emacs. This generator is different. It generates sprites by putting together art assets made by the program's creator. That means that the output contains a substantial amount of content made by the program creator, which means that it would likely be covered by the program creator's copyright. If the content was licensed to you under the GPL, you normally have to abide by GPL restrictions when you redistribute the content or incorporate it into your own program. Copyright holders can, if they want, grant additional permissions to their content and allow you to incorporate that content into nonfree software. For instance, the GCC compilers have an additional permission for their runtime libraries to let you use them in any GCC-compiled code; without that permission, GCC could only be used to compile GPL-compatible code. But unless the copyright holder has granted those permissions, when program output contains large amounts of their copyrighted content you're bound by the GPL when using it. In this case, the program specifically says that the art is dual-licensed under GPLv3 and CC-BY-SA-3.0. Since the generator's output is a combination of premade art assets (the buttons just let you tell the program which art assets to combine), the output is a derivative work of those assets. You can't use it unless your use is compatible with the GPL v3 or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (either works, since dual licensing lets you pick either license).
You can't You agreed: by submitting Materials in any form to the Company, in addition to other provisions of the Terms, you automatically grant Company a royalty-free, world-wide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and assignable right and license to use, copy, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, edit, translate, create derivative works from, transmit, distribute, publicly display and publicly perform such Materials for the purpose of displaying and promoting the Materials on any website operated by, and in any related marketing materials produced by, the Company and its affiliates. They can keep and use your data forever and give it to whoever they want. The clause you quote doesn't alter that. All it says is that once a year, if you ask, they will tell you what information they shared and with whom. If they feel like it they will tell you how to get the information deleted.
The copyright owner is whoever first put the material in fixed form. It is most likely that that is the note-taker (you). It is possible (and highly unlikely) that the lecturer read (had memorized) a prepared script and you copied that script mechanically, and if that were the case, he would hold copyright and you infringed by making a copy. Typically, a note-taker follows the logic of a lecture and expresses those ideas in his own words (the notes do not match a plausible verbatim class lecture). Since expression is protected and ideas are not, that makes it most likely that you would prevail in a suit. The equations are almost certainly not protected.
Copyright Prominent at the bottom of the page is: © RealClearPolitics 2015 This is nice because it tells you who you have to approach for a licence. If it wasn't there the material would still be copyright you just wouldn't know who owned the copyright. Questions So: If I'm looking to build an app or write a book and I wish to use statistics, am I allowed to basically use their numbers as long as I cite where it is coming from? No, unless what you do constitutes fair use and I don't think it does. If I do make a profit from it, do I owe any royalties to the original scientists/surveyers? No, but you would owe whatever licence fee you negotiated with the copyright holder, ostensibly RealClearPolitics. Must I ask them for permission? Yes, unless you are OK with running the risk of being sued. Commentary I see books reference hundreds of studies all the time This is because they are generally protected by Academic Fair Use public polls should be open information to everyone The only public poll that I know of is an election and that information is available. What you are looking at is a private poll commissioned by and paid for by RealClearPolitics and it is their intellectual property; why should that "be open information to everyone"? commercial interests may be legally entangling Always