Who owns copyright of a photo taken by a camera after the timer is set to 10 seconds? Who owns copyright of a photo taken by a camera after the timer is set to 10 seconds? Is it the person who set the timer? But he/she didn't take any picture. A machine did.
To the extent that the photograph is an expression of the operator's originality (e.g. framing, subject, angles, camera settings, etc.) it is the operator who has the best claim to copyright. Whether it was &quot;made by a machine&quot; misses the issue: what matters is the degree to which the purported author contributed originality. In your hypothetical, the operator is the person responsible for fixation of the work and the person who contributed original expression to the work. It is the &quot;the product of [that person's] exercise of skill and judgment&quot; (the Canadian standard) and an expression of a &quot;modicum of creativity&quot; (the U.S. standard). See generally, CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, 2004 SCC 13; Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1990). But the Copyright Office has stated that: [it] will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” Copyright Compendium, s. 313.2 I am comfortable predicting that a mere 10-second delay will almost always fall on the side of the line where the operator would be considered to be an author.1 1. At the other end of the spectrum are pre-positioned cameras that record continuously or when triggered by motion. Who (if anyone) holds the copyright in that circumstance has not been answered, with opinions differing across jurisdictions and academics: some arguing that the device owner would hold copyright, some arguing that no one would, others arguing that it would be fact-based inquiry about who might have contributed sufficient originality.
Simply admitting that the images are not yours does not give you the right to use them. The fact that you are not profitting from them does not change this. There is no magical statement or disclaimer that will change this. If your use of the images constitutes Fair Use (since you're not mentioning how you're using them, it probably doesn't), you can include a fair use disclaimer. Sample dislaimers can be found online. A disclaimer should include the following: A statement that the work in question is not yours That the use falls under Fair Use and why Section 107 of the copyright act
"Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work." Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf So if you have not been granted authorization, you are violating the right of the owner. It's always recommended that you get permission. Practically speaking, if the owner does not give you permission, there is probably someone else with a similar photo who will! Pretty famous recent case: Barack Obama "Hope" poster
It depends. Wikipedia is quite strict on its policies, and it only allows uploading images (and other media) that either are in the public domain or with a licence that allows to be reproduced (often, Creative Commons, CC). If you go to the details of the image it claims that the picture is licenced under CC, with attribution to Saffron Blaze. So most probably Saffron Blaze got permision to take the picture, and he distributed it with the CC-Attribution licence. When scrapping a web site for data, Google and other engines usually search for metadata (the robots.txt file) that tells them what to index and what to not. If a user gives them permission to index a picture by not stating restrictions in the robots.txt, they can do index it. Of course, in both cases it might be that someone uploads a picture that he does not have permission to share. In this case the situation will, of course, depend on jurisdiction, but many laws have provisions that ensure that, if the content provider is dilligent in addressing copyright issues caused by the users, they are protected. For example in the USA the Digital Millenium Copyright Act establishes &quot;safe harbor&quot; provisions that protects content providers if they give a way to denounce copyright infringiments and address those in a given timeframe.
Copyright expires 70 years after the original writer breaths his/her last breath, after that it becomes public domain. And all works published before 1923 are in the public domain in the US. This means that the inheritors of the rights cannot sue you for infringement because there is nothing to infringe. If the music is not in public domain you will need to contact the rights holders and negotiate the rights to use the music. This can also be a company that has the right to sublicense the content to others. This is often the way radios and DJs get the right for the music they play.
Wikipedia has two kinds of pictures: Reusable pictures, most of them stored at http://commons.wikimedia.org Copyrighted pictures under fair-use, stored on the local Wikipedia (in your case, the Russian Wikipedia) but not on Commons. To know what case it is, just click on the Wikipedia picture, click on the blue "Description" button, and see whether it redirects you to Commons or not. Pictures on Commons are reusable if you include the author and license (see the full requirements). Commercial use is OK. Fair-use pictures can not be reused. Unfortunately, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Файл:Tschedrovitsky.jpg is in the second case, so you can not reuse it, even in a non-commercial setting, unless you can justify that your usage qualifies as fair-use in your country. Hopefully one day someone will find a legally reusable picture of Shchedrovitski and upload it to Commons.
Let's put to bed the myth of privacy that is at the heart of your question: in R v Sotheren (2001) NSWSC 204 Justice Dowd said “A person, in our society, does not have a right not to be photographed" So they can ask you to stop; its bad manners if you don't but it is not illegal. If they are the controller of the property then they can stop you filming from their property but they cannot stop you filming into their property from outside (either public land or land where you do have permission). See How do laws affect photography of non-humans in public when people may be in the frame?
Depends if the artist is a contractor or an employee Let's say I am the person who created Spiderman, but my artist came up with the design of the costume and everything Well, it certainly looks like you didn’t create Spider-Man - the artist did. If they are your employee then you, as their employer, own the copyright. If they are a contractor, then they own the copyright which can be transferred to you under the terms of the contract or otherwise. What if the design was written in paper and then the concept artist represented the written design graphically, does that make any difference? Not really. Here the artist has created a derivative work but since they did so with your permission, that’s fine. The derivative work is a seperate work with its own copyright owned as stated above. How can you make sure you don't face this problem if you hire an artist for your work? You set out in the contract who owns the copyright.