How can Crabs Adjust Humidity be legal? Crabs Adjust Humidity is, as its makers describe it, "a crappy little third-party, unofficial, unauthorized expansion card set" for the wildly-popular game known as Cards Against Humanity. Personally, I love the idea. I don't have the expansions myself yet, but I think it's great that people can create things like this to even further expand a game that I thoroughly enjoy. (Further, that is, beyond the existing, official 6 major expansions and dozen or so minor booster packs.) However, I am also wondering a bit as to how they can legally do what they're doing. Presumably, this is facilitated by the fact that Cards Against Humanity uses an unusually-permissive license for a commercially-sold product of its sort. The game, and all official expansions, are under a Creative Commons license which allows other people to do a number of things that they wouldn't be able to do under the typical copyright licenses attached other works. In particular, without needing to pay royalties or obtain special permission, other people can: Copy and redistribute Cards Against Humanity as-is. Make and distribute derivative works that are based upon, and may even partially or fully include, Cards Against Humanity. However, the particular license used for Cards Against Humanity is CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. This puts the following restrictions upon sharing and re-use of Cards Against Humanity: Attribution (BY): Appropriate credit must be given to Cards Against Humanity LLC, and changes from the original work must be noted. This should not imply any endorsement by Cards Against Humanity LLC. Non-Commercial (NC): Any copies of Cards Against Humanity, or derivative works, are not to be used for commercial purposes (e.g.: sold) without permission of Cards Against Humanity LLC. Share Alike (SA): All copies of Cards Against Humanity, or derivative works, must use the CC BY-NC-SA license or another Compatible License. Crabs Adjust Humidity clearly meets the BY requirement. They mention several times over on the site that their expansions are not official and they are in no way affiliated with Cards Against Humanity LLC. A notice on their website even specifically states that it is not the Cards Against Humanity website, provides a link to the official Cards Against Humanity site, and encourages people to "Go there and buy it now. We'll wait. Get all of the official expansions, too. They rock.". The NC requirement is where they most obviously appear to fall short. Crabs Adjust Humidity is being sold, both directly from their own website as well as through other vendors. (Personally, I first discovered the products by seeing them on a shelf at my favorite local gaming store.) Each individual expansion (each containing 112 cards) costs $14 USD, with a boxed set of all 5 for $50 USD ($10 per expansion/$4 off each pack/$20 off the set). For comparison, Cards Against Humanity sells their main game (550 cards) for $25, major expansions (100 cards each) for $10 each, and smaller expansions for varying prices. There is no official boxed set for Cards Against Humanity. (The Bigger, Blacker Box is - mostly - just a box.) So, Crabs Adjust Humidity expansions are being sold at about a 25% higher per-card cost than the official major expansions. When you compare the boxed set of Crabs Adjust Humidity to the official main game, the former has a nearly-double per-card price. (Arguably, this isn't an "apples-to-apples" comparison.* But it was a lot simpler than trying to differentiate costs between Black Cards and White Cards.) Crabs Adjust Humidity also seems to fall afoul of the SA requirement, as the product (as seen on their Counterfeit Crabs page) and the website have the standard "copyright ... All Rights Reserved" notices. Thus Crabs Adjust Humidity cannot be handled per CC BY-NC-SA, as the license on Cards Against Humanity would seem to require. Of course, infringement upon copyright (whether actual or simply perceived) tends to not carry consequences unless the copyright holder chooses to pursue them. However, it seems that the creators of Crabs Adjust Humidity (and, as I've discovered while writing this post, about a half-dozen other companies) have chosen to make and publicly sell these works in seeming violation of the CC BY-NC-SA license without much fear of such recourse. Is this all really legally defensible, or are these products only surviving because Cards Against Humanity LLC has not yet chosen to take action against them? *Pun not originally intended, but now it totally is.
The "Crabs" game can be legal if it is seen as a form of parody. That is one of the forms of "fair use" that allows copying (within limits). This is to allow the use of limited amounts of copying for critical or "mocking" pieces, which are considered a form of free speech. Two other issues come into play under "fair use." The first is whether or not this is "commercial" (yes) or non-commercial (e.g educational) use. That is mildly negative for "Crabs" but by no means dispositive. The second is the likely market impact, whether the new use tends to compete with the old use in its "home" market, or whether it is likely to open a new market of a very different, perhaps "opposite" audience that might later buy the original as a "crossover." The "Crabs" game seems to address the "green" or at least "pro animal" (PETA) market. If the defendant can show that the "Cards" market addresses e..g., your "inner Nazi," making it "opposite," that would be ideal. It would be less convincing if "Cards" were addressing e.g. human rights, because that might be seen to overlap with the green market in terms of social conscience.
You cannot safely rely on the US doctrine of Fair Use, except if the rights-holder sues you in US courts. In France, there are limited exceptions to the authors proprietary rights. Under Art. L-122-5, there are some relevant potential exceptions: 3ºa) analyses and short quotations justified by the critical, polemic, educational, scientific or informatory nature of the work in which they are incorporated... 4º. parody, pastiche and caricature, observing the rules of the genre. Your description of the intended use does not fit these criteria. Consulting with a copyright attorney is advised, if you don't want to obtain a license.
Hypothetically speaking, if a program doesn't come with a EULA, does that mean someone in possession of it (who isn't the owner) would be breaking the law if they used it? If the copy on the stick was lawfully made with permission of the copyright holder, then you can lawfully use the software. Someone who lawfully comes into possession of a lawfully made copy of the software (that was not a backup) has the right to use that software in the ordinary way. For example if someone found a USB stick lying on the ground and it had software on it but no EULA, could they use the software? Maybe, but it would be hard for them to know whether they could or not. It might be a backup. It might be an unlawful copy. There was a case where a person found a CD in the trash that was clearly an original. The package had a shrink wrap agreement, but he found the CD without the package. The court held that he had every right to use the software on the CD (since it was a lawfully-made copy and not a backup) and was not bound by the EULA (since he hadn't opened the package). But he was very fortunate in being able to demonstrate these facts.
You are asking the wrong question. It should be: When you have downloaded the content and metadata, what are you allowed to do with it and what is forbidden? Somebody owns the copyright to the text and images in the thumbnail. This could be the operator of the third party website, or that site has licensed the content from yet another party. You haven't licensed it from anybody. So you can watch the content in accordance with the TOS, and your computer can evaluate the metadata to do it, but you cannot display it on your own site. Details will differ between jurisdictions, of course. You might also be held responsible for illegal content in the thumb you generate. Follow-up: There seems to be some question of what 'thumbnail' and 'card' mean in this context. This answer assumes a somewhat scaled-down representation of the content of the entire page, not just a collection of actual metadata like content length and expiry.
It is unclear whether WINE is infringing copyright or if it can rely on a fair use defense. The CAFC held that: that the declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of the API packages are entitled to copyright protection In that light, if WINE had original content in the structure, sequence, and organization of its API, the CAFC would likely also find that it is entitled to copyright protection. However, because this issue is outside the scope of the CAFC's exclusive jurisdiction (this is a copyright issue, not a patent issue), the holdings are not binding in any other circuit. Each circuit is free to review anew the copyrightability of APIs when such a case comes up. My guess is that this is the reason the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on CAFC's Oracle v. Google opinion. To address your fair use question would be simply speculation, because fair use is always assessed case-by-case, and even in WINE's closest analogy (Oracle v. Google), the CAFC remanded the fair use question back to the trial court, and that question hasn't been decided yet: we remand for further consideration of Google’s fair use defense in light of this decision
As for plagiarism, that is not a legal concept, so he can define plagiarism however he wants. It certainly isn't, under any definition I have ever seen on Earth and I have seen many (it has to do with "claiming someone else's work as your own"). As for copyright, a set of questions is (potentially) protected by copyright. If they are copied from somebody else's book of questions, then the book author (or publisher) holds copyright. Let's say that QM invented the questions, such as "What is the Turkish word for Janissary?", "What is the most prominent feature of Jannissary garb?" and so on. Then that set of questions, when put down in fixed form, are protected by copyright, and cannot be copied without permission.
If you create a new work that is derived from or based on someone else's work, it is a derivative work, and you cannot do so without permission from the original copyright holder. If the original work is made available under a CC-BY_SA 4.0 license, you have permission, but it comes with conditions. One of those is that you must attribute the original work -- you must say what work yours is based on and who created it. Another is that you must license your own derived work under the same CC-BY-SA license (or a compatible one). This does not mean that your work is not copyrighted -- it is. But it does mean that you must grant to others the same rights that the creator of the work you used granted to you. That is what the "share alike" or SA part of the license means. if you don't like that, you should not use a work licensed under CC-BY-SA terms to create your own work. If you publish your work but fail to grant that license to others, you are infringing the copyright of the work you used, and could be sued. Note that if you had created a compilation rather than a derived work -- for example if you created an album of images from various sources, some of them under CC-BY-SA licenses, you would retain a copyright on the collection as a whole, and that would not have to be under CC-BY-SA. But in this case you say that you used the other person's image as a background for your own illustration. That is creating an "adapted" or derivative work, i am fairly sure, and invokes the share alike clause of the license. You might also want to consider the different case mentioned in If I include an unmodified CC-BY-SA work in a book, does the whole book have to be CC-BY-SA?
This kind of quotation, for commentary, criticism, or reference, is generally allowed without obtaining permission. In the US, this falls under fair use (see 17 USC 107. In the UK and most commonwealth countries, it falls under fair dealing. In other countries there are various exceptions to copyright that will probably cover this. Even answers that do not directly quote the rule books often use information from those rulebooks to write an answer. Facts and ideas are never protected by copyright, so this is not going to be an issue. See 17 USC 102(b), which provides: (b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. As a comment by user Trish reminds, game rules are facts and are not protected, although their exact wording may be.