Copyrightability of Third Party Technical Specifications Lately I've been writing a lot of specifications of (MIDI-ish) music formats for old commercial video games based on my own research (I have no access to anything by the games' authors). To what extent are specifications of formats you did not create copyrightable? Most of the material in the specs are my own writing, though they do include some tables from the game (e.g. track location tables, envelopes, etc.) and a bit of disassembly (to show what code needs to be modified by modders to move the tables to different locations), and I am writing about a format I did not invent and (if applicable) do not hold any copyright or patents on it. Am I able to put a &quot;Copyright Justin Olbrantz&quot; on these specifications, or are they in part or in whole uncopyrightable? One such spec is here.
Such a document is protected by copyright the moment it is fixed in a tangible form (which includes on paper and in a computer file). Your creative expression would be protected. But the facts of what the format consists of would not be protected -- copyright never protects facts. You may lawfully place a copyright notice on it, but such a notice will not grant you any rights to control use of the facts disclosed in the document, and would not even if you held copyright to the game or the format. Indeed in the modem era, a copyright notice has very little legal effect at any time on any document created after 1989. If the document is devoted entirely to describing the contents of the file format, there may be very little that is protected beyond the exact wording. If there is essentially only one way or a very few ways to accurately describe the facts, even the exact wording may not be protected. By the way, if you are going to use a copyright notice, the standard notice lists the year as well as the copyright holder (who is often but not always the author). Example: Copyright 2022 Chris Smith Legal Effect of a Copyright Notice In US law, 17 USC 401(a) provides that: (a) General Provisions.—Whenever a work protected under this title is published in the United States or elsewhere by authority of the copyright owner, a notice of copyright as provided by this section may be placed on publicly distributed copies from which the work can be visually perceived, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. [emphasis added] Subsection (b) which I will not quote, specifies the form of the notice. Subsection (c) specifies how such a notice should be positioned. And subsection (d) goes to the legal effect of the notice. Subsection (d) reads: (d) Evidentiary Weight of Notice.—If a notice of copyright in the form and position specified by this section appears on the published copy or copies to which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access, then no weight shall be given to such a defendant’s interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages, except as provided in the last sentence of section 504(2). Since the 1989 effective date of the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 (BCIA), the provisions of 17 USC 401(d) quoted above, are the only legal effect, in US law, of the omission of a copyright notice on a work protected by copyright. (The BCIA amended US copyright law.) Prior to that date, the omission of such a notice could cause total loss of copyright, although there were limited exceptions specified in 17 USC 405 and 406. Section 406 also indicates the legal effect of an incorrect notice on the copyright of the name and date specified in a notice on works published before the date of the BCIA. On works first published since that date, all such legal effects have ceased to operate. In countries other than the US, that have adhered to the Berne Copyright Convention, or the WTO TRIPS agreement, no notice or other formality is required to ensure copyright protection. This includes almost every country in the world, and includes all countries with a significant publishing industry.
A document can be distributed under more than one license. Just because it has been made available under a CC license for free, doesn't mean that IEEE can't negotiate a different license with different terms that allow them to sell the content. (This is similar to the way that a software library can be available for free under a license that permits non-commercial use, but also be made available for a fee for commercial use.) If you want to know whether IEEE is legally selling Aaron Swartz's manuscript, you can contact Morgan &amp; Claypool, the publisher that owns the copyright, and ask them whether this use by IEEE has been authorized by them. For the other documents you mention, contact MIT Press. Etc.
Depending on where exactly you are in the world, there is some protection for the representation of copyright-expired material if work went into presentation. So you might be allowed to put a Bach cantata into musical notation yourself, since he died in 1750, but you cannot simply copy another publisher's sheet music to save that work. The same might apply to an old newspaper article. If you find a print and scan it, you can upload it, but you may not be able to take it from the database organized by someone else. In austria, there is §40f Urheberrecht, which defines databases (they may or may not be collected editions). §40h clarifies how the right to a private copy in §42 extends only to &quot;private use and neither directly nor indirectly commercial purposes.&quot; In germany, there is 87a-e UrhG, which covers databases whose assembly did not represent creative work (e.g. by simply ordering things by date). They are protected if the assembly required significant investment. This &quot;lesser protection&quot; lasts only 15 years, not 70, and there is a &quot;a significant part&quot; test for copying less than the whole database.
may require that you obtain license rights from third-party owners or licensors of content that you include in your text inputs (Emphasis mine). Based solely on the excerpt above, yes, you have the copyright on the audio files if you created the source material, as you are the creator, using Amazon Polly as/to generate a "tangible medium". One of the central rights granted by copyright is to control translation into a different medium (in this case, from text into audio), as is the right to control distribution, which is what this excerpt is talking about. "Third party" in this case means neither you nor Amazon. Basically, Amazon is informing you that using their software on someone else's copyrighted material does not grant you copyright on the audio recording.
Basically, statement 3 above is correct. The owner of the copyright in a work may release that work unmder different, even incompatible, licenses, as many times as s/he chooses to do. None of these releases cancels or invalidates any other. A person who obtains a work from a site where it is listed under a particular license, may rely on that license grant. The owner may (if the site allows) modify the license or remove the posted work, but this does not invalidate the license granted to those who obtained the work before any modification or removal. An incorrect or incomplete copyright notice does not, under current law. invalidate the copyright, and to the best of my understanding will not invalidate either of the license mentioen in the question.
Since the person who posted the game component under the CC-BY license has no right to do so, no one who used it in reliance on that license had any rights either, and all such uses were at least technically infringement (unless they came under a copyright exception, which seems unlikely). The holder of the copyright on the component could sue in any country where a game using it was published. The details of the law, including the rules on damages and other remidies, will vary from country to country. In the united-states those rules are contained in Chapter 5 of title 17 USC particularly sections 502-505. Section 504 provides for possible money damages. Section 502 provides for a possible injunction (court order to stop infringing). Section 503 provides for for infringing works to be seized. Section 505 provides for possible awards of costs and legal fees to a successful plaintiff (copyright holder). Section 502 allows injunctions to &quot;prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright&quot; on &quot;reasonable&quot; terms. But when the infringement has already been stopped, no such injunction is needed and a court is not likely to impose one. Section 503 allows the court to order the impoundment of infringing copies and &quot;plates, molds, matrices, masters, tapes, film negatives, or other articles by means of which such copies or phonorecords may be reproduced&quot;. This is largely obsolete for digital content. Section 504 is the key. It offers the plaintiff a choice between actual damages plus profits and statutory damages. The rule for the first is: The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. This means money made by use of the unauthorized content, plus any loss of sales or other losses suffered by the owner. Money mad by the infringing work but not made by use of the infringing content is not included, if this can be proven. Income obtained after the infringing content was removed would probably not be included in the infringer's profits. Statutory damages can be any amount between $750 and $30,000 that the count thinks is just, but id the infringement is proved to be &quot;innocent&quot; the lower limit is $200. The exact provision reads: In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200. An award of costs and fees under section 505 is entirely up to the discretion of the court. If the maximum possible award of infringer's profits is $10,000, and a defense of innocent infringement is plausible, a plaintiff might well find such a suit unprofitable, given the legal expenses involved in preparing an carrying through such a suit. But that is entirely up to the copyright owner. An owner may choose to file even an unprofitable suit in an effort to deter others. A person who has discovered that s/he has innocently infringed a copyright and made some money in the process would be wise to document the prompt removal of the infringing content form any publication, and efforts to notify the copyright owner. Ther is no way to be sure what actions the owner will take, if any, within those that the law allows. Often a owner in such a case will not bring suit if the infringement was apparently innocent, resulting profits were small, the infringement has been halted, and future infringement by that infringer seems unlikely. But different owners have different policies on such matters. An owner can delay in deciding whether to file suit or not.
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.
Exactly the same way it works over all other content There are no special classes of copyright, there’s just copyright. What a user of a service may do with copyright materials will be spelled out in the licence. If there is no licence, then they are left with fair use/fair dealing.