Is a mall considered a &quot;public place&quot; for copyright purposes? I understand that if I want to take a picture of an area for commercial use, I am beholden to copyright laws. As per 17 US 120, The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place. The inside of a mall is an open space, but it is privately owned. Is it considered a &quot;public place&quot; by this definition?
The mall is a privately owned public space At least while it’s open to the public. A photograph of architecture taken from within it would not violate copyright. However, photographs of other things (like art) do not have the public space exemption. Additionally, the owner can limit or restrict photography. This has nothing to do with copyright, just that an owner has the right to control what happens on their property (within legal limits).
Yes, except for the part where you say &quot;thus&quot;. Copyright protection isn't limited to published works, though in the past this was the case with US law. Current US law defines publication as the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes publication. A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication. Web distribution is one way to distribute a protected work. The distinction between published and unpublished works matters in terms of registration requirements, it figures into the question of the nationality of the author, the duration of protection for a work for hire and (pseudo)anonymous works, as well as the duration of protection for works created before January 1, 1978 but first published between then and January 1, 2003, and so on. The US Copyright office provides guidance that derives from court cases, and they have this to say about published vs. unpublished. They give as an example of publication (&quot;Offering to Distribute Copies or Phonorecords to a Group of Persons&quot;) Publication occurs when copies of a photograph are offered to clients, including but not limited to newspapers, magazines, agencies, wire services, and websites with a license permitting further distribution or display of the photograph. also An offer by the copyright owner on a public website to purchase and download an app that they developed and made accessible on that website constitutes publication of that app. German copyright law makes mention of &quot;publication&quot; as well, for instance The right of publication and of exploitation of the work accrues jointly to the joint authors; alterations to the work shall be permissible only with the consent of the joint authors. However, a joint author may not refuse his consent to publication, exploitation or alteration contrary to the principles of good faith. Each joint author shall be entitled to assert claims arising from violations of the joint copyright; he may, however, demand performance only to all of the joint authors. §6 says that (1) A work shall be deemed to have been published when it has been made available to the public with the consent of the rightholder. (2) A work shall be deemed to have been released when copies of the work have been offered, with the rightholder’s consent, to the public or brought to the market after their production in sufficient quantity. An artistic work shall also be deemed to have been released when the original or a copy of the work has been made permanently available to the public with the consent of the rightholder. One would have to inquire into the specifics of German law to know if &quot;putting one copy on a website&quot; constitutes being brought to the market after production in sufficient quantity.
In your example is the spare part the subject of a design patent? I assume it is not. When you combine the spare part to create a “different product” does the finished product resemble the drawings in the design patent? If, in its intended use, the final thing is close enough to the design patent to fall within its scope then you might by indirectly infringing by inducing people to infringe. The scope of a design patent is very difficult to determine reliably. This has nothing to do with how you got the components of your product, just how the completed thing looks. Copyright does not cover products (unless it is a model of a building or a statue or mold for a statue).
A work of art is protected by copyright, under US copyright law – see here esp. §908. Jewelry designs are typically protected under the U.S. copyright law as sculptural works, although in rare cases they may be protected as pictorial works. This Section discusses certain issues that commonly arise in connection with such works. (followed by a discussion of what jewelry is). The item must be &quot;sufficiently creative or expressive&quot;, which we will take to be self-evidently true.
If I draw something, having been inspired by looking at some other thing, you are not copying that thing. If you carefully copy something even if you are also deliberately changing features of the original, then you are copying. Copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to make copies. There is a difference between copying music and visual art in this respect, since music can be reduced to a small set of specific symbols, so "being inspired by" a musical work is often found to be infringement. The difficult part is legally distinguishing "making a copy" versus "being inspired by". The courts use a subjective test of "substantial similarity" to decide if there has been copying. the case of Mannion v. Coors. "Pose" is an element that is considered in assessing similarity: the question the court would ask (itself) is whether such a pose could ever have come from elsewhere (such as, your own creative efforts).
Not only can’t you trademark it, you can’t use it The original logo is covered by copyright which belongs, prima facie, to the original artist. It doesn’t matter that they are based in Russia; Russia and the US are both signatories to the Berne Convention which means they protect each other’s copyright. That means you can only use it if it is fair use (it isn’t) or if you have the copyright owner’s permission (you don’t). Could I still use the logo I bought and trademark it in the US granted that the seller had made some revisions to the stock photo he found? Not if the seller didn’t have permission to make those changes. Creation of a derivative work is one of the exclusive rights copyright gives. The seller had changed up some parts of the stock image, this includes color scheme, orientation, and made the picture look a little low poly. See above. The original artist of the stock photo is based in Russia and as far as I can see there is no registered copyright on it and don't think they could apply for US copyright anyway. They already have copyright. They would need to register it in the US before they could sue but there is no impediment to them doing so. While I'm not sure where the seller (located in Pakistan) officially downloaded the logo, I had nothing to do with the final design of it or downloaded anything from a stock photo website myself, so I'm not sure if I'd be bounded by any terms of the stock photo website Makes no difference. Just because you didn’t steal the car, that doesn’t make it ok for you to drive it. The stock image is very niche and a bit random. Across all the websites the artist has published it on, it has about 5 or 6 downloads altogether. Not relevant at all. As far the copyright of the seller's work goes, the Fiverr terms state that buyers have all the copyright, though I don't know if this is nullified by the use of the stock image. You can’t sell something you don’t own. If the seller had no right to upload the photo (as it seems they didn’t), the terms of the website don’t matter. The true owner never agreed to those terms and isn’t bound by them.
You are correct that facts in general are not protected by copyright, and most raw data are facts. However, a collection of data may be protected by copyright as to its selection and organization. A use which copies such selection might possibly be copyright infringement. If data constitutes a trade secret it may be protected as such, and &quot;improper&quot; access might be unlawful. This would not apply to publicly available data or collections of data. If, to access a data set, one must sign or agree to a contract, that contract may limit the use of such data. Again, this would not apply to most publicly available data.
"Public domain" refers to things in principle copyrightable but where protection has lapsed, been repudiated, or is a statutory exception (such as government works). A website is not "in the public domain". The idea that a website is "public property" is (*cough*) mistaken. There are basically two ways in which a web interaction could be illegal. The first regards whether accessing another person's computer is illegally accessing a computer, which is a crime. Authorization essentially comes down to "permission": if the owner permits me to access the computer, I am authorized. Putting stuff out there on a web server is an open-ended grant of permission to look at a web page. That simply means that if I create a web page (with a bunch of links or not), I am granting you permission to interact with my computer to that extent. It does not create permission to hack into a password-protected subdirectory. An ordinary web crawler automates what a clicking human does. Copyright law is also relevant, in that the stuff I put on my webpage is not to be copied without permission. Any webpage access necessarily involves automatic copying from machine to machine: in putting stuff out there for the world to see, I am saying that the world can do that level of automatic copying that arises from normal html-and-click interactions. It does not mean that you can download and do stuff with my copyrighted content (i.e., it is not an abandonment of copyright: I did not put that stuff in the public domain). Putting a web page out there in an unrestricted fashion means that you've given a certain level of permission to "copy" (at least in the automatic server-to-browser viewing sense). I may want to impose conditions on peoples' access to my stuff, so I can impose terms on such material. For instance, I may require users to agree to certain conditions before accessing the CoolStuff subdirectory. Users then have to jump through a minor hoop and agree to those terms. In that case, my permission is conditional, and if you violate the terms of that agreement, I may be able to sue you for copyright infringement. It could then be a violation of my terms of service (TOS) if I say "you may not crawl my website" (in less vague language). A TOS gets its legal power from copyright law, because every webpage interaction involves copying (I assume that technical point is obvious), and copying can only be done with permission. You may technologically overcome my weak click-through technology so that the bot just says "sure whatever" and proceeds to illegally use my web page: I can sue you now for copyright infringement. The robot-specific methods of meta-tags and robots.txt have no legal force. Although there is a way to say "no you may not," which is tailored to automated access, the meaning and enforcement of these devices has not yet reached the law. If my page uses NOFOLLOW and your program doesn't know or care, you (your program) do not (yet) have a duty to understand, detect and respect that tag. Prior registration is also not a legal requirement, and very many pages that are on the master crawl list get there from being linked to by someone else's web page. Again, there is at present no legal requirement of pre-registration (and there is no effective mechanism for verifying that the site owner has registered the site). Archiving and especially re-displaying someone's content is, on the other hand, not legal. It would be plainly copyright infringement if you were to scoop up someone else's webpage and host it. You can analyze their material and somehow associate it with some search terms, and display a link to that page, but you cannot copy and republish their material. You can put very short snippets out there taken from a web page, under the "fair use" doctrine, but you can't wholesale republish a webpage. (It should be noted that the archive.org is an internationally recognized library, and libraries have extra statutory powers to archive).