Should I be worried about Plagiarism here? I run an online food blog. In the website, I post modified recipes that I find, I improve them, and post them; with credit of course. Does this count as plagiarism? I want to make an eBook, is it sufficient to list just the sources or do I need written approval from them?
Plagiarism is an academic concept, not a legal one. The issue you are concerned about is copyright infringement. A work based off of another copyrighted work is a derivative work. This requires permission of the copyright holder. Simply listing your source and saying &quot;no crime intended&quot; does not help. However, recipes are generally not copyrightable (at least in the UK/US). This is because they are a list of ingredients and instructions which is not sufficient for a creative work. The presentation of the recipe can be copyrighted, as can any descriptive text surrounding it. If you're just taking the actual recipe, making a better recipe from it, and presenting that recipe in a better way, you should be fine.
If the blog author holds the copyright on the ebook, they can distribute the ebook anyway they choose, either via download from Github or elsewhere, or sell it in an online store. They hold the copyright, they alone can decide how to distribute it. If they also sell the ebook in the Microsoft press Store, they may have an agreement with the store to also allow their own free downloads; it's hard to say without knowing the agreement. If there are ebooks on Githb available for viewing or download, the owner of the Github page should hold copyright of the ebook, both 1) for their own protection against copyright infringement, and 2) to not break GitHub's TOS against copright infringement: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-copyright-infringement-and-dmca-policy
Numbering is for the sake of clarity, and is not intrinsically required. If you refer to a section, you need a way to say which section you mean, and a vague description like "up there where I talked about copying" is insufficient. You can refer to a section by a title, if you need to refer to sections within the contract, as long as your titles match what you refer to them as (and you don't have two sections called "Your Rights").
When you are citing a source to back up your statements, you may generally quote a reasonable amount. Under US law, this will be a form of fair use Under the laws of other countries, this may be permitted under one or another exception to copyright. The available exceptions and how they work vary from country to country, but reasonable quotes should be allowed in almost every country. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? You should: Make it clear what content is quoted, who originally wrote or said it, and when and where it was published; Quote not more than is needed to support your point. Not quote in such a way that your work can be used as a substitute for the source work. If you are not making a reference quote, but merely reusing an idea from a source, it is usually better to write the idea in your own words, not closely following the structure or wording of your source. However, if you are criticizing or commenting on what another author has written, you may (and should) quote enough to show what your comments or critique refers to. The same principles apply as with a reference quote: make what is quoted clear; attribute the source; and quote no more than is reasonable needed for your purpose. Consider whether you really need to quote &quot;long paragraphs&quot; or can just quote key sentences, perhaps along with paraphrases of the rest. If at all possible, the parts you quote should be only a small proportion of the source work.
"Doing the same thing" is very common. We even have names for certain categories of websites, such as "web shop" and "blog". Such concepts are not protected in general. Obviously, you can't copy the name of existing webshop, or their logo, but things like a "rectangular layout of products for sale" aren't original. There is of course a grey area here, because there's a continuum of similarity. In general, similarities that follow from technical justifications are acceptable (having an upload button is sort of the point for your website), similarities that are cosmetic only (same color choice) might be interpreted as intentional attempts to cause confusion.
Yes. Content not created by a user is not protected by Section 230, and if the platform agents or employees begin to substantively edit content, the platform becomes a co-author rather than merely a platform for that content.
Details depend on the juristiction. For that, consult a lawyer if you plan to publish your app anywhere. But generally, even simple texts from exercises can be covered by copyright. Compare song lyrics, which are not much longer (and might not involve more creative thought than a good exercise ...). For vocabulary lists, it gets more tricky, but those can be covered as well if the assembly of the list was a creative effort. So if you simply list the 1,000 most common worlds in English and their translation, you are possibly fine, but if the words are divided into units and lessons, that's creative work.
Technically speaking, such emails are copyrighted by the sender. However, showing such an email to a third party, or posting it publicly in order to comment on it would almost surely be a fair use in the US. In any case, such an email would have no commercial value, and so there would be no financial damages possible. A lawsuit over such a technical copyright infringement would, in my view, be quite unlikely, and even less likely to be successful. Indeed, filing such a suit would be one of the best ways for the business to draw attention to the issue, in an example of the Streisand Effect.