Will the YU-GI-OH! card copyright ever end? Day by day they bring out new cards, I wonder if someday the royalties will end and if so when approximately?
It will end Each card has its own copyright. Using the united-states as the basis, because most countries mimic them, the copyright for a published work with a known author ends approximately 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years from publication for company-owned copyrights. The Yu-Gi-Oh manga was first published in 1996 and its author died in 2022, so the underlying manga will enter the Public Domain in 2093. The card game consists of three elements: the cards themselves, the artwork on them and the rules. The rules aren't copyrighted. The artwork's copyright is tied to the artists making it, if it is licensed art, or the company, when it is work-for-hire, so might or might lapse at two points: 70 years after the artist's death or together with the card. The card's copyright in the compilation lapses 95 years after the publication. The first set of Yu-Gi-Oh cards was published in 1999, so the copyright will lapse at the earliest 2095 on the first card set. But only that first card set. Other card sets will enter Public Domain when their 95 years are up.
It's complicated You still own your own posts First off, you own everything that you originally created. Posting it on Stack Exchange doesn't affect your rights to your own content. Incorporating suggestions If you copy any of the text from posts that were created by others, you must comply with the CC BY-SA license. The exact version will depend on when the content was posted, and can be viewed by clicking the &quot;Share&quot; link or viewing the post's timeline via the clock icon on the left. Currently, new posts are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, which requires you to (basically) provide attribution with the creator's name, a link back to the content, and an indication of whether changes were made. A more detailed description of the exact requirements is here. You would also be required to license the work that you incorporated it into under the same license. However, game mechanics aren't copyrightable. If you merely used mechanics suggested in the posts without actually using the actual creative expression (for instance, names or description text) from the posts, you would not be required to provide any attribution or use any particular license, because you didn't use any copyrightable material from the post. A thank-you would still be nice All that said, it's still a nice thing to do to provide some sort of informal thanks to those who provided valuable assistance, even when you're not legally required to do so.
Imagine if the answer was a simple yes: adding a disclaimer was enough to exempt you from any and all copyright and trademark law suits. If that was the case, there would be no point in copyright or trademark law at all, because everyone could just include this disclaimer and never be sued. That doesn't mean every disclaimer is useless, but it does mean that copying and pasting some vague wording without understanding what it means is very unlikely to help you very much. The example you give is a good example of doing just that; the terms it uses are real, but they've clearly been thrown together without real understanding: Copyright is the right to control and profit from a creative work. This is relevant because images of Pokemon characters created for games, manga, etc are copyrighted by their creator. Trademarks are words, symbols, images, etc exclusively associated with a particular company or product. Trademark law aims, among other things, to avoid customers thinking they are getting an official product when they are not. &quot;Nintendo&quot; and &quot;Pokemon&quot; are both themselves trademarks. They are also the names of different companies. My limited understanding is that &quot;The Pokemon Company&quot; will be the owner of all the copyrights and trademarks related to those games, manga, etc. Naming them is a way of showing that you have researched this and understood their rights. &quot;This app is not affiliated , endorsed or supported by Nintendo in any way&quot;. This is a disclaimer on the trademarks. Whether this is sufficient to protect against claims of counterfeiting depends on how prominent it is compared to other branding - you need to make it obvious to users that the product is unofficial, not bury this in small-print for the lawyers to find. &quot;also some images used in this app are ... supported under fair use&quot; - fair use is a US legal concept which allows copyrighted works to be used in certain specifically limited ways. Saying your use is covered does not make it true, you need to actually understand what provisions of the law allow your specific use. &quot;no copyright infringement intended&quot; This is a fluffy apology that has no legal standing. A more useful statement might be &quot;every care has been taken to adhere to copyright and trademark law, if you notice a violation please contact X&quot;; but you're still relying on goodwill, and it won't stop someone sending the lawyers in if they decide to. Which brings us back to the real question: The apps mentioned before are in the store since 2015 and they haven't been removed yet. The real reason for this has nothing to do with the poorly-written disclaimers, it is that Nintendo / Pokemon co haven't bothered. If an app is directly competing with an official app, or receiving a lot of attention (even if no money), the lawyers will descend; if it's a buggy image gallery with a dozen downloads, they might decide they have better things to do. If they do notice, they might just get Apple and Google to de-list the app, but not spend the time and money pursuing a legal case. On the other hand, at any time they might decide they need to tighten up control of their intellectual property, and make an example of a few authors picked at random. The only way to avoid that is to actually avoid violating their rights, rather than just saying so in a disclaimer.
By &quot;buying the song&quot; on Gumroad you don't actually buy the song, you buy the right to do specific things with that song. I couldn't find the exact license terms, but for 800 Yen (about $6) for a whole album I highly doubt that this will include much more than the right to listen to the song on a private device. The rights to publicly perform, reproduce, redistribute, use commercially etc. usually cost a lot more. So if you want the rights to use the song in your own video, you will have to negotiate the purchase of a license which allows you to do that with the creator. Or if they reassigned their copyrights to a music label or copyright collective (which some music artists do), with that organization. There are some exceptions in the copyright laws of some countries where you can use parts of a song without a license. For example, the &quot;fair use&quot; exception in US copyright law if you review, discuss or analyze a song. But such exceptions usually don't apply if you use the song as background music, adapt the song into an own work or even just reupload the song on your own channel.
As usual with trademarks, the key question is "will reasonable people be confused about the source or affiliations of the product or service". Trademarks are, as you already know, limited to a particular industry or area of business, in general. Displaying user videos is not exactly the same thing as a particular popular song, but they just might be close enough for some consumer confusion tom occur. Whether reasonable people are in fact confused into thinking that the app is in some way sponsored by the makers of the song is a question of fact. A trademark suit would probably need to present some sort of evidence that confusion had occurred or was likely. It also may make a difference whether "Tik Tok" has been registered as a trademark. In the US, registration gets greater protection than mere use. (In some countries there is no protection without registration.) It is also possible that the app has already licensed the rights to the term from the trademark owner for the song. This would avoid a potential suit. It is also worth noting that the term "Tik Tok" is not original with the song. It dates back, in that spelling, to at least the "Oz" books by L. Frank Baum and others Tik-Tok of Oz dates from 1914, and the character of the Tik-Tok from the book Ozma of Oz (1907). Terms that are not original coinages are less strongly protected in trademark law, and the app could claim to be alluding to the Oz character, not the more recent song. A comment by ub3rst4r says that: the term "Tik Tok" is registered as a trademark in the USA by "Bytedance Ltd" (which is the company that operates the app). If that is correct, the US Patent and Trademark office (PTO) came to at least a preliminary conclusion that this trademark did not infringe anyone else's trademark. That doesn't meant that an infringement suit is doomed, but it would make any such suit harder and less likely. It seems that, as described in this news story a company selling watchs under the name "Tic Tok" was sent a cease and desist letter on behalf of the singer Kesha Sebert. The firm responded by filing a suit for a declaratory judgement. The case is Wimo Labs LLC v. Kesha Sebert, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, No. 1:11-cv-02978. However, google does not show any resolution of this case, one way or the other. This was brought to my attention in a comment by StephanS. As this docket record shows, the case was dismissed by agreement without prejudice, apparently after a settlement (as stated in the comment by user muru). Thus there was no ruling on the merits of the case.
It would be copyright infringement. You had the copyright holders permission to make one copy of the song by downloading it. At that time, if you gave me a copy of that song, it could be argued that very, very little damage was caused because I just had downloaded that song myself with practically the same effect. Today, that argument is not valid anymore. So this is definitely copyright infringement. That's your question answered. I doubt that anyone would take action if you gave a copy to someone and it was found out. Making it available to the world for free download is another matter. That could easily get you into trouble; in the USA there could be a fine up to $150,000 without any proof of actual damages needed.
If you use the reviewer's code, or code derived from it (e.g. if you just changed a variable name) then they own the copyright on that part of the software. If the reviewer describes a solution which you implement, or if you re-implement the code from scratch while taking ideas and methods from the reviewer's code, then you own the copyright on that code. However if there are only a few ways to implement something in code then the code is not creative and hence cannot be copyrighted. For example the regular expression in the question you link to is (as far as I can tell) the only correct solution to the problem: any programmer addressing the problem will have come up with that RE. In this the position is akin to a database of phone numbers: while the collection may be copyright (depending on whether selection or arrangement required creativity), the fact that Alice Jones has the number 012345 is not copyrightable, and neither is the alphabetical arrangement of names. Where it gets messy is the boundary between the two. The requirement to detect 4 or more repeated digits in a credit card number could be implemented in a number of ways, but whether there are enough of these to qualify any particular solution as "creative" would be a matter of fact for a court to decide.
Your issue is trademark, not copyright. If these other guys use their mark (product name) in commerce but did not register it, they have an unregistered trademark which you could be infringing. Between two users of the same trademark, the first to use in commerce wins. (There is a territorial component but with the Internet, meh.) If the trademark is registered that gives them a presumption of validity. Trademark infringement is concerned with consumer confusion. If someone uses someone else's trademark in a way that confuses consumers as to the origin of the goods, that's a problem. What this means is that if I make tires with the name Sportie and someone else makes soap also with that name Sportie there is not a high likelihood of confusion. Likewise a hotel in Washington called Runner's Cove probably doesn't infringe a shoe store in Florida with the same name. Fantasy games and fantasy books sold over the Internet? Sounds like a potential problem that you might want to clear up before the second book.