Licencing restriction and first sale doctrine UK re. secondhand book Does a geographical licence restriction hold after resale as secondhand item? I have a book (in UK) that is no longer of any use to me, that I now plan to sell on, and notice that there is a restriction printed both inside and on the cover &quot;This edition is licenced for sale only in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Circulation of this edition outside of these territories is unauthorised and strictly prohibited.&quot; Does the doctrine of first sale hold such that I can sell this on, even though that would effectively be circulating the book outside the stated territories? As I bought the book secondhand, does that serve to exhaust/limit copyright and licencing restrictions, or would any contravention of copyright/licence continue to be attached to the book, regardless of how many owners it has had?
You are not bound by any contract. You bought a physical good that the seller was barred from selling outside of the listed countries by his supplier. You did not enter a contract with the seller's supplier. Let's look the stream of commerce: Supplier of the item (Printing press) offers it. Sale with a sales limiting contract to resellers. Sale by reseller to customer without limiting contract. The first sale doctrine says, that without a form of contract, the rights of the supplier are exhausted in step 2. Even with a contract limiting the reseller's rights, step 3 exhausts any right the supplier has in the item, unless he too explicitly signs a contract. Selling an item in normal commerce is not satisfying this requirement. There already were no rights in the physical copy of the book when whoever bought the book first sold it to the second-hand seller you bought it from, and there can't be any more rights in the selling of this book gained by the original supplier unless he bought the book back from you.
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.
Copyright law regulates copying of protected material. In the US, there are no laws that specifically prohibit reading anything. It may be illegal to be in possession of something (classified material), but if it is legal to be in possession, it is legal to read. (Do not confuse "read" with "read aloud to an audience" a.k.a. perform, which is a separate copyright protection). It is not illegal to be in possession of material that was copied without permission.
In the US, the right to publish is vested in the copyright holder, who is initially the author. That right can be transferred for example by a transfer agreement, and it can be inherited just as other property can be inherited. Under the terms of the will, it is most likely that the copyright was transferred to the spouse even if the will didn not say "including all copyright". There is a small chance that it wasn't disposed of if the wording of the will is restrictive enough (for example "I bequeath all real estate and tangible property to my wife", which doesn't include intellectual property). If so, that would definitively require the assistance of an attorney, and a court proceeding to dispose of the copyright. If there was no provision under the will for copyright, then the copyright could be divided accounting to the rules of succession of your state, however, the courts would want to be persuaded that it was not his intent that his wife receive the copyright as well. Possession of the physical manuscript is largely irrelevant – it does not give the manuscript-holder the right to override copyright law, although if you are in lawful possession of the only copy of the manuscript, you may be able to thwart plans to publish. Publishers generally require decent evidence that the person submitting the manuscript does legally hold copyright, when a work is submitted by someone other than the author.
They have copyright in their additional text, and possibly in things like their visual design choices (fonts, layout etc). They may also have introduced a few deliberate typos to detect any literal copies from their version (rather as mapmakers add a few imaginary features to their maps). None of this creates any rights to the original text. You are still free to produce your own copies of the original text. Just get it from some other source so you can be sure not to include anything of theirs.
The names of such units are not protected by copyright, and never were. However their insignia would have been under Crown copyright See also Ministry of Defence Crown Copyright Licensing Information. Crown Copyright expires after 50 years for all published works, but lasts for 125 years after creation for unpublished works. Works obtained through archives, such as the Imperial War Museum, are often considered unpublished, unless they were previously published in some form. Use of an insignia on a uniform may not constitute publication. Some UK military insignia, including most current insignia, is also protected by trademark. But if the insignia are not used to advertise a product, nor to identify a product, nor in such a way as to imply sponsorship, endorsement or approval, trademark protection would not apply. In any case it is not at all clear that WWII-era insignia of now-defunct units are currently protected by trademark in the UK. If an insignia is still under copyright or trademark, the above linked licensing information describes how to apply for a license. Free licenses are available in some cases for use in books, but not, apparently, for &quot;commercial products&quot;.
Is an article licensed under an Open Access license equivalent to a public domain work? No. Intellectual property practitioners and professors often describe copyright as "a bundle of sticks." This means that intellectual property laws grant the creator of a copyrightable work a large number of rights, and the creator can grant or deny others each of those rights individually. So, for instance, an author can grant a publisher the right to publish his or her book in one country, but not in another, or to copy it verbatim but not to alter it. The purpose of a license, any license, is to specify which of those rights pass to the licensee (the end user) and which stay with the licensor (the creator). This is true of creative commons just as it is for any other license. For example, many open access publishers publish under the Creative Commons CC-BY journal. This is an attribution license; it requires as a term of the license that you give credit to the original creator. This is something you would not have to do with a public domain work. In addition, under CC-BY, you have to include a copy of the license with each copy you distribute, and you cannot add your own copy protection to any copies you distribute. Again, these sort of restrictions do not apply to a public domain work. In short: the purpose of a license--any license--is to define the ways in which you can, or can not, use the licensed materials. Any license that contains any provisions restricting the licensee's use is going to be more restrictive, by definition, than the use of something in the public domain.
Without a license, you have no right to copy or distribute someone else's work. Suppose you copy or distribute against the terms of the license. Either you didn't agree to the license, and therefore had no right to do as you did; or you did agree and still violated the terms of the license anyway. By the law of the excluded middle (accepted or not accepted), you infringed either way.