Does copyright cover the use of artwork in a video? If I appear in a video wearing a shirt with a copyrighted image on it, is that a violation? What about if the artwork is being used as an illustration? For example, if I'm doing a video tutorial on painting, and use a painting someone else has done to illustrate a point, or as example of a particular method.
Yup, copyright statutes and case law cover these situations. In Canada, look at at Copyright Act Section 30.7: It is not an infringement of copyright to incidentally and not deliberately (a) include a work or other subject-matter in another work or other subject-matter; or (b) do any act in relation to a work or other subject-matter that is incidentally and not deliberately included in another work or other subject-matter. The US doesn't have this in statute, but some defendants used a fair use defence, some successful, some not. (http://www.iposgoode.ca/2010/04/cindy-incidentally-the-incidental-inclusion-exception-in-canadian-copyright-law/) If you're using a piece of art as part of a tutorial, or being illustrative of a point, or subject of commentary, review, or criticism, that may be fair use or fair dealing.
If the image is protected by copyright (as most modern images are), the uploading it as a profile picture or using it on a web site is copyright infringement unless one has permission from the copyright owner, or an exception to copyright applies. If copyright infringement occurs, the owner can sue for damages, or issue a takedown notice, or both, but does not have to do either. In the vast majority of cases, no one will do anything about such infringements if the owner (or the owner's authorized agent) does not. All the above is true in all of Europe and North America, ad in most other countries as well. Permission can be granted directly by the copyright owner to a user, or granted by the owner releasing the image (or other wrk) under a license. Google's general developer TOS Document](https://policies.google.com/terms#toc-content) reads (in relevant part): Google content Some of our services include content that belongs to Google — for example, many of the visual illustrations you see in Google Maps. You may use Google’s content as allowed by these terms and any service-specific additional terms, but we retain any intellectual property rights that we have in our content. Don’t remove, obscure, or alter any of our branding, logos, or legal notices. If you want to use our branding or logos, please see the Google Brand Permissions page. Other content Finally, some of our services give you access to content that belongs to other people or organizations — for example, a store owner’s description of their own business, or a newspaper article displayed in Google News. You may not use this content without that person or organization’s permission, or as otherwise allowed by law. The views expressed in other people or organizations’ content are theirs, and don’t necessarily reflect Google’s views. It would seem that each Google service has its own terms which indicate in what ways one may use Google content. It would further seem that content originally obtained from others and distributed by Google will have some set of permissions granted by the uploader. These must be checked for each image, I would think. There is no single one-rule-fits-all answer. I gather that the APIs will have methods for determining which images are from Google itself, and which from others, and some method for indicating the permissions that accompany an image. A user of these APIs must learn how to extract ownership and permissions metadata for an image obtained via the API, and how to use it (or not use it) in accordance with the available permissions. Now let us look at exceptions to copyright. These vary by country. Several European countries have an exception for &quot;personal use&quot; which might cover the profile pictures, but probably will not cover general use on a web site. There are exceptions for &quot;news reporting&quot; which might cover images illustrating recent news events. Some have exceptions for educational or instructional use. The UK (and several othe countries) have the concept of fair dealing which bundles several exceptions together. This might cover an image used in a personal profile, use of images in news reports, and limited educational use, but will probably not cover general use on a website. The US has the concept of fair use which is rather complex, but does not specifically include a &quot;personal use&quot; exception. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? and other threads here tagged with fair-use for more on this. It is somewhat unlikely that any of these exceptions will cover general use on a web site of images obtained via Google APIs and used beyond the permissions listed in the metadata accompanying the image. But it will very much depend on the specifics of the case. If the image fetching is doe not by you in building a site or an app, but by your app's users who may then use them improperly, strictly speaking that is each user's own responsibility, you cannot effectively police what your users do, and have no duty to try. It will be a good practice if you include text explaining to your users that not all images are free for general use. You might want to link to the Google TOS. If the API returns metadata indicating the permissions status of each image fetched, yo0u might well want to provide this metadata in a useful form to your users. You might even want to allow a user to filter images obtained by permission status. But whether this is practical or useful to users will depend on the purpose and design of an app.
Ideas are not protected by copyright, only arrangements of words are protected. If you &quot;rephrase&quot; by only a minor change of wording, leaving much of the wording intact, that is still a copyright infringement unless an exception such as fair use or fair dealing applies (and that seems a bit doubtful in this case). If you &quot;rephrase&quot; so that the wording is quite different, even though the idea is the same, there is probably no infringement. Copying elements of computer code or other IT commands that are essential to making an example work is not infringement. Where there is only one or a very small number of ways to naturally express a fact, copying such expression is not infringement, as facts are not protected by copyright. Adding examples but keeping significant wording unchanged is still likely to be infringement.
Your client is confused about how copyright law works (at least in the United States and virtually every other country I've ever heard about copyright in). If I were guessing, they read something like this from the United States Copyright Office: The copyright in a derivative work covers only the additions, changes, or other new material appearing for the first time in the work. Protection does not extend to any preexisting material, that is, previously published or previously registered works or works in the public domain or owned by a third party. and figured that because it's a derivative work, the copyright only covers the additions and changes they make, and there's no copyright protection for the original work. This misunderstands the law: the original work still has its own copyright (assuming it hasn't expired), and permission from the holder of the copyright on the original work is required to create that derivative work in the first place*. The copyright on the derivative work is separate—that is, both copyrights exist in parallel. * Some exceptions, such as fair use, exist, but would be unlikely to apply to the situation you describe.
No This is not a copyright issue as you are not making a copy (save for a transient one in your cache which is allowed). You are allowed to record it for personal time-shifting as that is fair use/dealing. The broadcaster either owns the copyright (unlikely) or has a contract with the copyright holder that allows them to broadcast it. Assuming the broadcaster chooses or is not permitted to subsequently stream it, if you miss it, you miss it. Your contract with the broadcaster is over. Their obligation was to make the broadcast available to you, yours was to pay for it - nobody is obliged to watch it. You can, of course, seek the content from any other legal sources, complying with their terms including payment if necessary.
You can’t use pictures You can’t use any of these, nor can you make your own art that is derived from these. That’s copyright infringement and there is no fair use defence because you are specifically trying to do something Nintendo already does. You can reproduce that stats of the Pokémon because stats are facts (even if they are facts about fictional things) and facts are not protected by copyright.
Copyright protection is about certain acts, and not about relationships between products. Copyright law says that the creator of an original work hold the exclusive right to copy and to authorize creation of derivative works. Copyright law does not say that anybody can freely create derivative works as long as they are different to a certain extent. So if you take an original Mario and modify it a teeny bit, that is a violation of copyright; if you take an original Mario and modify it hugely, that is a violation of copyright. Degree of similarity is relevant on some cases when the factual question arises whether the allegedly-infringing work is based on some protected original. This is most obvious in music cases, where all baroque music has some similarity to all other baroque music, all death metal has some similarity to all other death metal, and so on. There is not a legal quasi-statutory standard for measuring substantial similarity in music. The scientific underpinning of such a standard would be based on (weighted) combinatorics and the idea that there are only so many tunes possible (that would be a huge number, until you get to the "within a genre" condition). It seems obvious (by your "admission") that the derived works are based on protected works, so Nintendo's permission is required to legally create such works. However, you do or would hold copyright in your unauthorized derived work. Without a trail of evidence such as a SE question pointing to the connection, the derived images might be hard to connect to the originals. In addition, you may be able to avail yourself of a "fair use" defense, in case you get sued by the original creator. Factors favoring such a defense are the insubstantiality of the copying (a small portion) and the "transformativeness" of your creation.
No, it's still copyright infringement. When you modify a copyrighted work in any way, you generate a derivative work which you are not allowed to distribute without the permission of the original copyright holder.