Legal Considerations When Self-Publishing a Book According to https://wordsrated.com/self-published-book-sales-statistics/, 300 million self-published books are sold each year. I am thinking about, in the future, uploading (i.e., self-publishing) two books to Amazon: (i) One that I re-typeset that I believe is in the public domain. (ii) One that I composed myself. I don't know who will appear as the publisher---perhaps, say, &quot;ABC publishing&quot; (if Amazon allows me to insert a name) or Kindle Direct Publishing. In any case, I am wondering if either I or KDP Amazon could get sued if, say, (i) someone wanted to contest my assertion that the first book is in the public domain; or, (ii) if someone did not like what I wrote in the second case and wanted to sue for whatever reason? Reasonably, can such occur; and if so, who would get sued---me or Amazon? If me, how may I protect myself? I would like to make the books available to the French and United States markets.
The vendor has available the DMCA safe harbor provisions if you decides to infringe someone else's book – the copyright owner notifies them that they don't have the copyright holder's permission, so they take the book down (independently the copyright owner sues you for infringement). There is a complicated procedure where they contact Amazon, Amazon tell you you've been accused of infringement and they take it down, they you can counter-claim that you have the right to distribute the book, then the owner files a suit against you). If Amazon doesn't comply with the DMCA formalities, they can be sued for contributory infringement. However: the copyright owner is the only person empowered to legally object – simply asserting that a book is &quot;not in the public domain&quot; carries no legal weight. If you are the copyright holder, but someone doesn't like what they can say, they can't do anything about it legally unless what you wrote is defamatory or is &quot;illegal for you to publish&quot; (you publish a fact that you cannot publish under a non-disclosure agreement; it constitutes a gross invasion of privacy...). The &quot;whatever reason&quot; matters very much. The consequence for you is that you will get sues and have to pay a bunch of money, plus the court will probably prevent any further distribution of the book. There are other sanctions in France, which I don't address here, for instance there are laws against publishing racist insults in France that don't exist in the US.
Copyright protection exists for any work (picture, paragraph, song etc), and persists for many years until it expires. Unless the work was created a long time ago, or was created by the US government (not the same as &quot;funded by government money&quot;), you should assume that the work is protected. That means that you must have permission to copy it. Sometimes, a work has associated with it some such permission, in the form of a &quot;license&quot;. Without such a license, you have to request the copyright owner for permission to copy – whether or not they say that the work is protected by copyright (because by law it is protected, so they don't have to say that it is). If you request permission to copy, and do not receive the required permission, then you cannot legally copy the work. The copyright holder has no obligation to explicitly deny permission. You can certainly list the URL for an image, you just cannot copy the image in your book.
Copyright law is not based on contracts, and does not require agreement. No one may distribute copies of a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder. For instance, in the US, both Persons A and F can be sued because Title 17, Section 501 of the US Code says: (a) Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner ... is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author, as the case may be. (b) The legal or beneficial owner of an exclusive right under a copyright is entitled ... to institute an action for any infringement of that particular right committed while he or she is the owner of it. Copyright infringement isn't an issue of violating terms you agreed to with a private entity. Your duty to not infringe copyright was imposed by your country's legislature, who does not require your personal agreement to do that.
All the CC licenses permit anyone to use the licensed content, and to make copies of it for others. Some of them permit using it for commercial purposes, others (the ones including the -NC- clause) do not. Some CC licenses permit creating modified versions of the original work (derivative works), others (the ones including the -ND- clause) do not. I do not know of any standard license which allows users to create and distribute derivative works, but not to distribute the original. The license used by Project Gutenberg permits re-use and re-distribution, but if a fee is charged beyond recouping expenses requires the removal of the PG name and logo. One problem is that if derivative works are allowed, this would include works which are only trivial modifications to the original, which would have the effect of allowing distribution of the original. If the main concern is about commercial sales, possibly a CC-NC-SA license would effectively serve the purpose? That allows redistribution, including of derivative works, but forbids commercial reuse or distribution without separate permission, and requires all redistribution to be under the same license. Otherwise a new license for this situation might have to be created. It is often a good idea to have the assistance of a lawyer with IP expertise in creating a new license, or the wording chosen may have unexpected effects or include unintended contradictions. Or one could simply place a basic copyright notice along with text such as "Modified versions may be created only with permission from the author. Request permission at work-permisisons@example.com". However, if the work proves popular, there might be a large volume of requests.
Under US copyright law, all works are protected by copyright except for US Government works. The concept of "public domain" is not legally well-defined, and is used colloquially to refer to government works, works whose protection has expired, works available to all, and works not copyrightable (such as scientific laws or old software). Under older copyright law, releasing a work without the copyright symbol effectively put the work in the public domain. One can simply say "I dedicate this work to the public domain", and that is typically taken to be enough. CC0 purports to do this (using more words). However, as far as I can tell, author rights under European law are so strong that it is simply impossible. Releasing works into the public law has to be consistent with other aspects of the law. If you grant an perpetual exclusive right to copy and distribute to a publisher, their right does not go away on your death (a right which they would not have with a real public domain work). A problem is that an author who makes such a dedication (a bare license) could revoke the license and reassert their copyright. They could be estopped from making that argument. As property, your heirs would inherit the copyright and could (try to) revoke the license. Presumably the courts would not allow them to pursue ostensive infringers. Nevertheless, your plan is neither trivial nor bullet-proof.
The relevant concept is dedicating a work to the public domain, that is, saying in the work something like "This work is dedicated to the public domain". I understand that this isn't entirely reliable in European civil law. The preferred alternative is to license it to the public. However, you have to decide how "free" you want the work to be made. The normal state of affairs, where you do nothing and just rely on copyright law, is that you have the sole right to allow copies to be made and derivative works to be created. Thus if someone were to make a derivative work based on your composition, they would need your permission: but then they would have the right what they created (such as a translation). If you just abandon your property right to the work, you impose no obligation on others, and a person can freely create a translation (which is now their property). If you execute the right public license, you can allow people to use your work as long as they include that license in their versions. A fairly common public licensing scheme is the Creative Commons licenses. That article gives a decent summary of relevant rights and how particular licenses correspond to configurations of permissions. I would say that the most difficult thing to do is to figure out what you don't want to happen, and pick a license that matches that interest.
A book (or any other creative work) published in the 1800s is now in the public domain everywhere in the world (excepting odd cases like Peter Pan where a special rule applies in some jurisdictions.) Anyone may legally quote from such a work at any length with no legal requirement for permission. In fact there is no legal requirement to attribute the quote to the author (although there is an ethical requirement). In fact one may publish a new edition of such a work, unchanged or modified in any way one chooses, with no legal need to obtain permission from anyone or to pay any royalties or fees. If the work were recent enough to still be protected by copyright, a limited quote could be used under fair use, fair dealing or another exception to copyright under the laws of most countries. The exact rules vary by country, and are often highly fact-dependent, so the exact details will matter. If one wanted to quote enough from a recent work that permission is required, the copyright holder, who is often not the publisher, would need to grant permission. That is often the author or the author's heir, but it can be a person or firm to which the author transferred the rights. Sometimes the rights-holder can be hard to identify. Update: it would be possible for a work published in, say, 1890 by an author then young who lived to a fairly old age, dying in, say 1960, to still be protected in some countries, although not in the US. (Anything published before 1925 is now PD in the US.) But Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, and all of her work has long been in the public domain
In the US, due to free speech protections (i.e. the first amendment), it seems that the majority of lawsuits for negligent publication fail. It's worth noting that the author might be more liable than the publisher, since the publisher typically isn't expected to have the expertise to catch such errors. More cases and details can be found here. The only case I've found where a publisher was held liable for negligent publication of a textbook is the following. Note that it's somewhat old, and standards for products liability have likely changed since. D. Wallis, &quot;Negligent publishing&quot; Implications for University Publishers: On September 4, 1980, a jury in the U.S. District Court in Springfield, Massachusetts awarded C. Carter $100,000 in her suit against Rand McNally Publishing Company. C. Carter, an eighth grade chemistry student had been severely burned during a chemistry class while attempting an experiment described in a textbook published by Rand McNally. This experiment called for the use of methyl alcohol, a highly inflammable substance. The plaintiff argued, and the jury agreed, that her injuries were caused, in part, by the publishing company's negligent failure to adequately warn students and teachers about the dangerous qualities of these experiments. Rand McNally did not appeal the verdict. This case is of special interest to publishing companies because it is the first time a book had been considered a &quot;product&quot; and the first time products liability theory has been used to impose liability upon a publishing house for an injury caused by technical information contained within a textbook. In this case it's not clear whether the disclaimer was present or not. However, there is nothing magical about a disclaimer that would stop lawsuits from occurring, nor do they automatically protect against liability: The &quot;disclaimer,&quot; although it will rarely be effective in shielding the publisher from liability if the court finds that the publisher breached its duty of care to the reader, is more likely to be effective by demonstrating that the publisher did not make any specific guarantees regarding the safety or reliability of the contents of the publication.