Sputnik-era NSF-funded books: is this a license? In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, which also had the unintended side effect of launching frantic attempts in the US to reform math and science education. A common pattern in these efforts was that the NSF encouraged university professors to drop their research work and spend a chunk of their lives writing textbooks. Usually there was some kind of three-way arrangement involving the NSF, the professor, and a publisher. Tax money flowed in from the NSF, and the publisher published the book. When the book came out, there was language on the copyright page stating that the materials were available to be adapted by all publishers. This was to encourage innovation and allow the materials to be freely improved by educators if the initial version didn't work well. Sometimes this public availability was after a fixed date, something like 5 years after initial publication. Some important and influential books of this kind are: The SMSG ("new math") books for K-12 (info, scans) The Berkeley Physics Course PSSC Physics (books and films) I have seen varying claims online about the legal status of these materials. For example, I've seen claims that the SMSG books were immediately placed into the "public domain" so that they could be freely adapted and experimented with by various educators. However, this SMSG book has a standard copyright page, with a copyright by Yale University Press, and no notice saying that it was freely available. The 1960 edition of PSSC Physics has a standard copyright page, but a later college-level book based on it has this additional notice: The materials taken from the original and second editions and the Advanced Topics of PSSC PHYSICS included in this text will be available to all publishers for use in English after December 31, 1970, and in translations after December 31, 1975. The book Electricity and Magnetism by Purcell from the Berkeley Physics Course has this: The preparation of this course was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to Educational Services Incorporated. In accordance with the National Science Foundation's policies concerning curriculum revision material developed under their auspices, McGraw-Hill Book Company, a division of McGraw-Hill, Inc., announces that the material in the Berkeley Physics Course, Vol. II ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM, which is copyrighted by Education Development Center (a successor by merger to Educational Services, Inc.) and published by McGaw-Hill Book Company in 1965, will be available for use by authors and publishers on a royalty-free basis on or after April 30, 1970. Interested parties should address inquiries to the Managing Director, Educational Development Center, 55 Chapel Street, Newton, Massachusetts, 02160. Because the Purcell text is a classic, I did substantial work a few years ago on producing a free digital version. However, I belatedly began to wonder whether I was really on solid legal ground. I contacted EDC, which still exists but no longer owns the copyright. They sent me through a chain of contacts. It turns out that there is a third edition of the book from Cambridge University Press, and CUP is licensing the book from Purcell's sons. CUP wants to protect their commercial interest in the book and has refused to give me contact information for Purcell's sons. Is the language in the front of these books a license, or is it only the offer to negotiate a license? Is this different from the type of modern copyleft license we see on projects such as Wikipedia, where I don't specifically need to contact the copyright holder? I suppose a license is a type of contract, and modern copyleft licenses have all the elements that are needed in order to make them legal contracts. Is some such element missing from the notices in these books? The notice in the front of the Purcell book says, "In accordance with the National Science Foundation's policies concerning curriculum revision material developed under their auspices, [...]" This seems to imply that when these publishers took NSF money, they accepted an obligation to freely license the materials. Can they simply duck out of this obligation by selling the copyright to someone else, or is the copyright somehow encumbered by this obligation?
There is a subtle difference between NSF policy and enforceable obligation. The primary stick that goes with the carrot is being excluded from future funding. Current policy does not generally force material in the public domain, but it is a possibility in "exceptional circumstances". There no doubt is a paper record somewhere in D.C. indicating whether such a codicil was added to any of these grants. NSF generally does not have contracts with individuals, they have contracts with institutions who have relations (typically employer-employee) with individuals, so even if there were a policy requiring works to be put in the public domain, NSF would have to go after the institution, who would have to go after the author. Since that would conflict with longstanding NSF policy on copyright, it is unlikely that they would want to pursue such an approach. The statement that McGraw-Hill Book Company announces that the material, which is copyrighted, will be available for use by authors and publishers on a royalty-free basis on or after April 30, 1970 is not itself a license, it is a suggestion that a license will com into existence. A present-tense declaration "this work is dedicated to the public domain effective April 30, 1970" can be interpreted as a license effective of a date certain. Similarly, "will be available to all publishers for use in English after December 31, 1970, and in translations after December 31, 1975" does not say that it is in the public domain effective of some date. One might say that the copyright statement is simply not well written and the author really intended the books to be in the public domain as of those dates. But without compelling evidence that the book was actually released into the public domain, a court is very unlikely to abrogate a person's property rights.
...articles are never signed by authors. Is it then enough that the magazine itself is in the public domain? Absolutely not. Even though articles are not signed, they are still copyrighted at moment of being written by whoever wrote them, and upon publication by who the authors are writing for. That's basic copyright law; read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention Further, the magazine's own Terms of Service outlines this: Intellectual Property The contents ... supplied to you in conjunction with the Site and/or a Digital Application (such contents, design and materials being collectively referred to as the "Economist Content"), is copyright of The Economist and its licensors. You may not use or reproduce ... for any reason without written permission from The Economist... http://www.economist.com/legal/terms-of-use
are there any safeguards you could take to preemptively block such behavior, such as a disclaimer inside the book cover that reads something like The safeguard you outline would be overridden as soon as the author enters any contract that requires assignment of copyright. (I would not delve in the differences between licensing and copyright assignment because that hypothetical author is dealing with a contract of adhesion which readily requires assignment; the author has no option to change the ToS to allow for licensing only) Under contract law, one of the essential prerequisites is that the conditions of a contract be entered knowingly and willfully. By deliberately clicking on a ToS page to move forward with the uploading a copyrighted work, the author is signaling his awareness and acceptance of the ToS. The fact that the author chose not to read the ToS is irrelevant and very unlikely to strike whatever entitlements the website owner formulated in the accepted ToS. For the same reason, the author's safeguard disclaimer does not bind the website owner: It cannot be said that the website owner was aware of that disclaimer at the time of the formation of contract between the author and the website owner. That is, the website owner did not knowingly and willfully accepted the author's safeguard. The website owner is not even expected to know about any safeguards which one of its potential user intends to establish. The length of a ToS document is also irrelevant because the website owner has the valid argument that "the user-author could have skimmed through the ToS or do a search (via Control-Find) of keywords such as 'copyright' or 'property', whence any allegation of 'inadvertent' assignment of copyright is untenable". Is there a way to protect your IP from inadvertently being licensed/stolen/assigned via TOS "agreements", without having to waste your life reading huge one-sided online "contracts" that are "subject to change without notice" anyway? Yes. That consists of not uploading one's works in such platforms. In contract law that would be expressed as "declining an exchange of considerations". There are many other alternatives for an author to promote his work without being required to assign copyright.
The case US v. Siesser is about such an attempt, where violation of 18 USC 229 was one of the charges (to which he pleaded guilty). It is a chemical weapon under the provisions of that chapter – it's not the chemical per se, it's the chemical when used for a purpose (like, killing people). Specifically A toxic chemical and its precursors, except where intended for a purpose not prohibited under this chapter as long as the type and quantity is consistent with such a purpose. You could buy it to calibrate NMR devices, I guess. There may be specific state regulations as well.
In the United States, I would strongly expect that an accurate depiction of historical fact (even if uncomfortably graphic) would be protected under the First Ammendment. Otherwise, the government could functionally censor the worst parts of history (as being too awful to discuss or depict), which is exactly the kind of thing the First Amendment is designed to prevent. There are three important categories of speech that are not protected: (1) "fighting words" directed at a person intended to provoke a fight, (2) words that infict emotional distress such that it qualifies as a tort, and (3) speech that court finds to qualify as "obscenity". Of these three, your game probably will not qualify for the first, since it generally requires speech directed at a specific person or people. I also suspect (less confidently) that an emotional-distress tort would not succeed since your game is not directed at any particular living people. Even if the game caused emotional distress to someone, your public release of the game probably could not qualify as a tort against that specific player who happens to experience emotional distress. The Miller test is used to determine if a work is obscenity. Wikipeida summarizes its three parts, all of which must be satisfied to constitute obscenity: Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law, Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The first two are explicitly sexual in nature. I don't know if there is any similar prohibition against hyper-violence, but even if there were, as long as your game does not run afoul of the "lacks serious artistic value" condition, you will be on the safe side of the line. Note that none of this stops anyone from initiating legal action against you (which may cause headaches for you); it only stops those legal actions from succeededing.
A GPS trace of a car's path, on its own, is unlikely to be covered by copyright in the first place. It is primarily made up of facts (the locations of roads and lanes), and there is no creativity involved in its creation. A database of facts may be protected by copyright as a compilation if there is some amount of creativity in how it is assembled, but this does not extend any protection to the individual contents of the database (cf. Feist v. Rural).
If you're in the USA, this almost certainly falls under fair use, or if you are in another jurisdiction, it almost certainly falls under an analogous exception for educational use. The fact that the excerpt is short contributes to this conclusion. You can also avoid having to rely even on these exceptions by choosing sources that are in the public domain. The specific date before which a work is guaranteed to be in the public domain depends, again, on your jurisdiction, but it's probably sometime in the early 20th century. For example, you're certainly on solid ground if you use Dickens.
Factual assumptions ohwilleke's answer is entirely correct. However, it makes factual assumptions based on the standard meaning of &quot;journal&quot; and &quot;author&quot;, which I believe to be unwarranted. From the question, it seems likely that we are talking about a scientific paper, which operates under a very different economic and legal model. I am going to assume that: the authors sent a draft of the paper, the preprint, to the journal editor; the journal editor sent the draft to external experts (the reviewers); those reviewers, and possibly the editor, gave some feedback; the authors modified their draft based on that feedback to produce the final version; throughout all this, the authors, editor and reviewers agreed with the journal’s policies; the journal policies require a transfer of copyright to the publisher, a legal entity that &quot;owns&quot; large number of journals and provides some technical services (article typesetting, maintenance of a web site with the journal contents, maintenance of DOIs, etc.); neither the authors, nor the editor, nor the reviewers received monetary compensation for their work (this is a key economic difference from non-academic journals, but as we shall see, it has little legal effect) In theory, all depends on the copyright release agreement When the author(s) submit a draft to a journal, they have to click through an agreement to release copyright. Such a clause could, in theory, be anything the authors and the publisher agreed that does not violate contract law. In practice, because the publishers are a small oligopoly, the agreements are more or less standardized. The &quot;sample publishing agreement&quot; given as example at https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright (as downloaded on March 2, 2023) is more or less representative: I hereby assign to the Copyright Owner the copyright in the manuscript identified above (where Crown Copyright is asserted, authors agree to grant an exclusive publishing and distribution license) and any tables, illustrations or other material submitted for publication as part of the manuscript (the “Article”). This assignment of rights means that I have granted to the Copyright Owner the exclusive right to publish and reproduce the Article, or any part of the Article, in print, electronic and all other media (whether now known or later developed), in any form, in all languages, throughout the world, for the full term of copyright, and the right to license others to do the same, effective when the Article is accepted for publication. This includes the right to enforce the rights granted hereunder against third parties. The authors are the sole intellectual contributors to the preprint version, but a copyright release agreement could still bar them from publishing it. The vast majority of agreements between novel authors and publishing houses forbid the author from selling the book rights to another publisher or posting drafts of the novel on the author’s website (two actions that would result in greatly diminished sales for the publisher). The published version incorporate revisions where the reviewers and possibly the editor contributed significant intellectual contributions. Again, all depends on the copyright agreement - the publisher terms could in theory require that the reviewers and editors release their contribution under an irrevocable license to the authors. In practice, all goes to the publisher. The financial structure is irrelevant The fact that authors (and reviewers, and editors) are not paid by the publisher is irrelevant. Yes, a contract (in common-law countries) requires consideration from both sides; however, consideration needs not be monetary. There is not much doubt that publication of an article is &quot;consideration&quot;, at the very least because that is considered prestigious among a significant fraction of the population. In addition, there is ample evidence that funding agencies and university HR staff evaluate and promote scientists based primarily on the papers they publish in scientific journals. In practice, preprint rules are lax The vast majority of academic publishers allow authors to publish the preprint version although conditions vary (only the preprint, only on a personal website, only for a limited time, only after some embargo period, only if you cite the final article with the correct DOI, etc.). I would speculate that this is the result of cultural pressure. Many academics decided to post their articles (sometimes the preprint before sumbission, sometimes the published version) on the internet without much regard to pesky questions of copyright law, because they viewed publishers as gatekeeping greedy monopolistic parasites. The publishers decided to embrace the practice in order to be able to put some limits on it, rather than try to mass-fire lawsuits against the people who provided them with free labor. Regardless of whether that speculation is correct, the current arrangement is not the inevitable result of legal rules, and publishers could conceivably decide to change their preprint sharing policies at any moment. Limitations to the copyright of research papers This section is quite obviously not exhaustive, but given that the original question does not specify a jurisdiction, I did not search beyond what I already know. In the united-states, works produced by employees of the federal government as part of their work duties are generally public domain (17 U.S. Code § 105; do note that subsection (b) means certain works produced by certain institutions still are under copyright). Hence, if the authors were both researchers at a federal research institution, the preprint is public domain and can be republished irrespective of the publisher’s will. (I am led to believe, however, that most US researchers are not employees of the federal governments, but rather of private or state universities.) In europe, as a result of public pressure against publishers (see &quot;greedy monopolistic parasites&quot;, above), the European Commission published non-binding guidelines (2012/417/EU) asking that there should be open access to publications resulting from publicly funded research as soon as possible, preferably immediately and in any case no later than 6 months after the date of publication, and 12 months for social sciences and humanities That (non-binding) recommendation has been adopted with varying adaptations in various EU countries. The exact implementation in a given country should be checked before relying on it. For instance, in France, article L533-4 du code de la Recherche allows authors (after the six or twelve months embargo period) to post the published version (not just the preprint), irrespective of what what signed with the publisher, as long as at least half of the funding for the research came from public funds. I will assume neither of those apply. The copyright owner is likely still around Academic journals are born and die regularly. However, academic publishers rarely do (Elsevier is almost 150 years old). As ohwilleke says, the copyright release contract signed 40 years ago is likely still valid; even if the publisher folded, it would apply to the publisher’s legal successor. (The question of how legal rights are liquidated in a bankruptcy would be an interesting question that I am not competent to answer; it is plausible that under certain circumstances the contract would be dissolved.) If the authors can access the copyright release they signed back when they submitted the article, you might be able to determine that posting the preprint or the final article is acceptable. (I realize that this is a fairly ludicrous hypothetical, given that the paper was published 40 years ago.) Otherwise, it is extremely likely that the publisher would be able to sue, even if the publication occurs with the authors’ full support. Whether they are likely to do so, and whether publishing anyway is ethical, are of course non-legal questions.