Would a website that catalogs every possible sequence of letters violate copyright? Suppose I created a website that cataloged every possible sequence of letters in order. You would start with the letter &quot;a&quot;, could swipe right to read &quot;b&quot;, and further to find &quot;aa&quot;, or &quot;ab&quot; (appearing in dictionary order, as you would observe on the rows of an excel sheet). My website has a feature where you can instantly read any text given a numerical ID. The IDs could, for example, be ordered as follows: Where individual texts in the catalog are separated by red bars, and the blue numbers are their respective IDs. This website happens to be a harbor for internet piracy. One user, for instance, discovered the numerical ID referring to the entire text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and has distributed the ID to their friends so that they may read the novel at their leisure. It's unclear to me where the copyright infringement occurs. Is it the website for &quot;storing&quot; every possible non-public domain text? Is it the user for finding and sharing a number that has apparent meaning to this website?
It's not clear to me that your website is, per se, illegal. (Though good luck finding a webhost with a hard drive large enough to store it. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is roughly 38,000 characters. If I've done my calculations correctly, storing all of the strings of this length or shorter would require something like 1053760 GB of storage. Give or take.) The main problem is in distributing the &quot;index&quot; of the string containing the text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This index is just the integer obtained by taking the entire text as a string and treating it as a number in base 26 (A = 1, B = 2, etc.) In other words, all of the information contained in the book is also contained in the index number, and in a relatively simple way. Distributing this number is therefore entirely equivalent to distributing the text; you don't need the website at all. It's entirely analogous to e-mailing the text to someone else; in that process, the text is transformed into a number (in binary, under a different encoding scheme) along the way. But you couldn't seriously argue in a court of law that you were not distributing the text, you were just telling a friend about a very large number. Just to back this up with some actual law citation: US copyright law gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to make and distribute copies of the work. And a &quot;copy&quot; is defined as follows: “Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. In other words, J.K. Rowling (and/or her publishers) have the exclusive rights to distribute that integer, since the work is &quot;fixed&quot; in it by its very nature, and since the work can be reproduced from it.
Yes So far so good. This is a copyright violation but it is probably fair use - certainly there is case law permitting a copy of a backup digital asset to be made so I don’t see why a similar argument wouldn’t work with backing up a physical book. Clear copyright violation. Alice can rent out the original under the first sale doctrine but the ‘backup’ is not so protected. It’s not fair use because it’s use is commercial, the work is a type of work the author expects to profit from, the entire work has been copied and the use is deleterious to the market i.e. the renters are less likely to buy an original - it falls foul of all four factors of the fair use test.
What are exactly the legal consequences of "All rights reserved"? Almost none. You have to explicitly grant copyright rights. You don't even need the Copyright notice for them to apply. My "almost" is because the notice makes it harder for somebody to argue "they didn't realize". Do I still need an additional SW License Agreement or is the Copyright notice above + a Disclaimer of liability sufficient? If this is free software (I know you said it isn't), do yourself (and everyone else) a favour by picking a license you like. Preferably either GPL or MIT (depending on your taste). There are far too many free licenses already. Please don't add another. (It also makes it much easier for any user of your software: "Oh yeah, GPL v2. We understand that. We can use it." as opposed to "What are the implications of using this one??" As this is not free software, I think you need a paid-for lawyer (who understands IPR in your juridiction.) Edit: In principle, I believe you don't need anything. The code is copyright, so the customer can't do anything with it (without explicit permissions that you haven't granted). However if the customer doesn't realize that or thinks you won't mind, you then have to go to court to enforce your rights (and probably end up with a disgruntled customer). A short, clear, license will make it clear to the customer what they are allowed to do, and save all that aggravation.
Whoever "derived" the illegal derivative work most likely has copyright in his derivations, unless they are not worth copyright protections. Say I take the Harry Potter books and add a few chapters and try to sell it - that's copyright infringement of course, but I have the copyright on these additional chapters. However, I don't have the right to allow you to copy the derived work. And even if you have the right to copy the original work, you don't have the right to copy the derived work because it is a different work. I could extract my changes, and allow you to take them and do with them what you like. You could then create an illegally derived work yourself. I couldn't sue you, but the original copyright holder could. To the comments: One, a work and a derivative of the work are not the same, so even if you have the right to make a copy of a work, that doesn’t give you any right whatsoever to copy a derivative work - they are not the same work. Two, the copyright holder has the exclusive right to control copying and the creation of derivative works. If the copyright holder doesn’t want derivatives to exist, then creating them, copying them etc. is always copyright infringement.
This is relatively uncharted legal territory, so until multiple cases establish some sort of precedent, we can only guess. I know of no legal requirement that a Browser or User has to submit cookies or referrer data or other meta-information accurately. In that regard, a user is unlikely to be prosecuted just for submitting HTTP headers. It is likely closely related to Free Speech issues. The DMCA spells out that it is illegal to circumvent copyright protection measures. While this law is typically used to make it illegal to copy DVDs, video-games or streaming movies, it is possible that the "3-free articles" policy could be interpreted as a copyright protection mechanism, and defeating it by changing HTTP headers is a circumvention. A good summary is here. A specific site's TOS (Terms of Service) probably contains language that spells out it is a violation to use the site in a manner other than as it is intended. This is a typical anti-hacking, anti-screen-scraping provision. Altering a browser session to circumvent their services is probably a violation of the license to access the site, and may open a user to a civil lawsuit for damages or even criminal hacking charges (the details of which are different state-to-state)
It depends on how much you "copy" (including translate). If you were to have a list of 250 or even 1000 challenging words that appear in the movie, and even list the words in the order that they first appear in the movie, then there is no question of infringing on their copyright. If you create a transcription or translation of any part of the movie, then you are potentially infringing (a transcription being where you write down the spoken English dialogue). There are circumstances, pertaining to "fair use", whereby you could defend yourself in a lawsuit, but you would really need to engage a copyright attorney to advise you where the limit is. The purpose of the "fair use" defense is to make it possible for someone writing a review of a movie to actually quote short bits of dialogue. From the perspective of what would be useful for language learning (i.e. the amount of text that you would need to copy), providing a translation would almost certainly constitute infringement. In listing words which occur in a movie, you would not need to limit yourself to just single words, because there are idiomatic expressions like "down with that" or "kick the bucket", which involve a number of words but function as single units. When it comes to text, the copyright holder does not own the specific words, but he owns the "expression". The closer your product is to replicating that text, the more likely it is that the product will be found to infringe (this is why my example involved just listing the words once: and it should not be the 25,000 most difficult words, since that would amount to near-literal copying for a substantial initial part of the movie). If the movie is also released with e.g. Arabic subtitles (which would involve a licensing agreement), then greater caution would be advised in providing a word-list of difficult words that appear in the movie, because of the "effect on market" consideration.
You can't, in general, know whether a distributor of a work has permission to distribute, or is a pirate site. I verified that they have posted an illegal copy of a work that I created, and I know that I did not grant permission to them (or anyone) to infringe my copyright. Both hosting and downloading works without permission is a violation of copyright law, so both parties are liable. Downloaders may erroneously rely on the "I didn't know!" defense, which in the US carries no legal weight. Even so, if you download my book, it will probably cost me vastly more to sue you for infringement than the damages that I might be awarded over your infringement. Usually, copyright holders go after the pirate sites, and only rarely go after particularly egregious serial downloaders.
Does GDPR prohibit reading unsolicited emails from people who have not explicitly opted in to a mailing list? tl;dr: No. I have never heard of this, and I don't see how this could follow from the GDPR. You should follow up with the Secretary to find out how she came to her conclusion. Detailed reasoning: The GDPR restricts the processing of personal data, so it does in principle cover reading email, since reading counts as "processing", and an email may contain personal data. However, Article 2 (emphasis mine) says that: This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data wholly or partly by automated means and to the processing other than by automated means of personal data which form part of a filing system or are intended to form part of a filing system. I would read this to mean that a human reading emails is only covered by GDPR if the emails are part of a "filing system" or intended to be. So reading the emails is ok, it's only problematic if you intend to systematically store them. Even filing them, while covered by GDPR, would presumably be allowed, because to actually act on the email, you would have to keep it, and Article 6 allows processing of personal data to "take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract" and when "processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller". One caveat: If the email contains data that falls under special categories of personal data (Article 9) you may need explicit consent for storage. That covers things like racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs and health information. So if someone discloses a health problem or their religious belief in their mail, you may need to ask them for permission to keep it. In summary: At most, GDPR would require you to promptly delete the email once you no longer need it (which could be immediately if the email is irrelevant to you). If the email contains data you legitimately need (e.g. a complaint you need to follow up on), you are allowed to keep it as required (based on Article 6 (f)). Note that in both cases no explicit consent is required from the email sender, unless the email contains particularly sensitive data, such as political/religious beliefs or health data.