Did Ready Player One have to get licenses for the usage of all its video game characters? Ready Player One is a recent book and upcoming movie that makes heavy usage of famous (and less famous) characters from video games (also movies and shows). Did the book have to get permissions and license from the copyright holders of all those creators? Would the upcoming movie have had to get fresh licenses for its usage? This sounds like it would be prohibitively expensive since they use many extremely popular characters.
Did the book have to get permissions and license from the copyright holders of all those creators? Probably not. This probably wouldn't have counted as a covered derivative work entitled to copyright protection and might have amounted to fair use with just mention in the text of a book Would the upcoming movie have had to get fresh licenses for its usage? Yes. It almost certainly did, probably at some considerable expense (although the producers may have already owned the rights to many of them) and there were probably some editorial changes in the characters made as a result of the negotiations to replace expensive licensor demands with less expensive characters. Also, keep in mind that contracts can be creative and often are in the financing of movies. The license was likely for a percentage of profits rather than a flat dollar amount, which was budgeted to be reasonable. No license means no inclusion in the movie and the loss of exposure if not included is an incentive to deal in addition to the license fee as exposure may increase the value of the licensed property if the movie is good.
Can a system include such information? it is surely technically possible. Would it be a violation of copyright? That depends. First of all, any such information can be included if the copyright holder has granted permission, probably in the form of a license. But in that case this question would probably not have been asked. I therefore assume that no permission has been granted. (It doesn't matter if a request was made and the answer was &quot;no&quot;, a request was made but ignored, or no request was ever made. No permission is still no permission.) The names of fictional locations are nor protected by copyright. Including, say, &quot;Rivendell&quot; or &quot;Hobbiton&quot; in the selection list for a timezone setting would not infringe the copyrights held by the Tolkien estate. But a map is a different thing. If the OS includes and can display a map of a fictional region, one that is copied from or based on a map published with the fiction, or by some third party, then that would almost surely be copyright infringement, and the copyright holder could choose to sue for infringement. S/he might choose not to sue, but that is a risky gamble to take. If this is in the US, statutory damages could be awarded, and could intheory go as high as $150,000, although they are not likely to be as high as that, that is just the maximum legal limit (per work infringed, not per copy). The standard is whatever amount the court thinks &quot;just&quot;, up to the maximum. (If proof of willful infringement is not made, the upper limit is $30,000, still a sizable sum.) If the OS designer created the map independently, using names from the fiction, but not otherwise basing it on the fiction, and in particular not imitating any map created by anyone else, then it may well not be infringement, but it would still be wise to consult a copyright lawyer. The question would be more helpful if it made clear just what would be hypothetically included in the OS, and to what extent it would be based on someone else's work. There is also the question of why someone would want to include fictional places, but that really doesn't change the legal issue.
Your example powers are tropes and their basis in public domain The Queen of Pain's scream is modeled after the Banshee, which had a scream that would kill... and there are LOTS of variants of Banshee. In fact, &quot;Our Banshees Are Louder&quot; is a trope. Hiding in a shadow or walking through it is for example a typical feature of Ninja stories since the Edo Period, and a common Trope as &quot;Shadow walker&quot;. That makes those two powers older than You can not have a copyright on concepts, facts, or ideas. Facts are not copyrightable, which was decided LONG ago over Feist v Rural. Neither can you copyright concepts or ideas. You won't get a claim on the concept of a damaging scream or turning into shadow. See also Copyright.gov (emphasis mine): How do I protect my idea? Copyright does not protect ideas, concepts, systems, or methods of doing something. You may express your ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in your description, but be aware that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in your written or artistic work.
If your app is published under US law, then the DMCA would apply, just as if it was a web site. The DMCA doesn't say anything about what particular technology the distributor is using. TO be protected by by the DMCA's &quot;safe harbor&quot; provision, you will need to include a notice in your app that you accept takedowns, and provide an address or method by which they can be sent, and an agent who will receive them. (You can be your own agent if you choose.) When and if you recieve a take down notice, you must check if it is valid in form. According to this Wikipedia article, a takedown notice must include: (i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. (iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material. (iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted. (v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. (vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. (See the actual text of the relevant section of the law.) If you receive (through your designated agent) a valid takedown notice, you must promptly remove the content and notify the poster (or you can instruct to poster to remove it, but you must do so yourself if the poster does not). If the poster then files a valid counter notice (see the linked sources above) with your agent, you must notify the sender of the original notice, and if the sender does not notify you of a copyright suit filed within 10-14 days, you must restore the content. Provided that these rules are complied with, the host gets a 'safe harbor&quot; and cannot be sued for copyright infringement, nor for the act of taking down the content. I believe that the agent must be registered with the US copyright office. The courts have not ruled on just how quickly an ISP or other host must react to the takedown notice. It must be &quot;expeditious&quot;. Moreover, Under the DMCA (i) 1) (a) The host must have, post, and enforce a policy denying access to repeat infringers, or lose safe harbor protection. The text of the provision is: (i) Conditions for Eligibility. -(1)Accommodation of technology. —The limitations on liability established by this section shall apply to a service provider only if the service provider— --(A) has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider’s system or network of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider’s system or network who are repeat infringers;
Alice has been developing her own enhancements, and they're pretty similar to Bob's. Neither Alice nor Bob has copied the other's enhancements, so neither has violated the other's copyright in the enhancements. Whether that could be proved in court is another matter, of course, but since the original work is licensed under creative commons the question unlikely to arise in court. Would Alice be prevented from coming up with enhancements to her own game if other people could prove they thought of and released the idea first? No. Copyright does not protect ideas. It only protects a particular expression of those ideas from being copied. Theoretically, if two authors come up with identical 500-word descriptions of something and can establish that each did so independently, neither has a claim against the other. The practical problem there, of course, is that it would be impossible to prove such a thing. Could Alice outright claim Bob's "Adapted Material" because he developed it on her original work? Assuming that in publishing his adaptations Bob followed the terms of the creative commons license with respect to the original work, Alice's only claim would be that he copied her adaptations without following the terms of the license. If Bob can show that he did not do so, her claim would fail. In a comment, you wrote: Suppose Alice went ahead and intentionally, somehow provably ripped off Bob's "Adapted Material" because she liked the content so much, does Bob reserve any rights on his adaptation, or is Alice able to commercialize the work that Bob did in extending her original work? If we assume that Bob complied with the license of the original material, we know that he licensed his adaptations under "the identical terms," so Alice would be able to use Bob's adaptations under those terms for non-commercial purposes. Since the assumption here is that Alice provably copied something of Bob's, I think it is fairly clear that she would be liable for damages if she exploited that material commercially without paying royalties.
No, it means you can't copy it. By default, the copyright to a work is owned by its creator, and nobody else is allowed to copy it, or create derived works, without their permission. That permission can be granted by a license. "License unknown" doesn't really tell us anything, but it certainly isn't clearly granting you permission. So you don't have permission to copy, and thus you cannot. You would have to seek permission from the copyright holder. See also If no licence is distributed with an application/source code, what license applies by default if any? (Some jurisdictions do allow for "fair use" exceptions, which allow you to copy a work without permission. You haven't said what jurisdiction you are in.)
To the best of my understanding: US copyright law does not have anything in particular to say about credits of this nature, for the most part. The law doesn't even say that you have to credit people at all. It just says you have to get a license (i.e. &quot;permission&quot;) to use the item in question. Even that is only required when the work is not a &quot;work made for hire&quot; (i.e. any work by an employee of the production company, within the scope of their job). There are some weird situations where the law does require a credit (e.g. a compulsory license acquired under 17 USC 115 requires the licensee to preserve metadata identifying the original song and artist), but this is the exception rather than the rule. The exact wording and ordering of film credits (and TV/other credits) is typically the product of extensive negotiations between all of the people credited, the production company, and (in most cases) their respective unions. It is thus subject to contract law rather than copyright law. Copyright licenses usually mandate some sort of credit be given, except for certain specialized types of work such as ghostwriting (where the whole point is that you don't get credited). Some licenses are more flexible on this point than others. For example, Creative Commons licenses set out a specific list of things that must be included, and mandate that it must appear alongside other credits if there are any, but other than that, you can basically word and display the credit in any way that is &quot;reasonable.&quot; However, one-off private licenses will likely be much more specific and restrictive about how the credit is displayed. Speculating: It may be the case that different attorneys drafted different licensing agreements with different credit phrasings wholly by accident, or for no particular reason, simply due to a lack of direct coordination. In other words, nobody was actively trying to make sure all the credits matched, so they didn't.
Any adapted work derived from a work used under a CC-BY-SA licnese must be distributed, if at all, under a compatible license. The question is whether a large work incorporating a much smaller work is said to be "based on" that work. The CC-BY-SA 4.0 legal text does not use "include" or "incorporate" or any similar term to define an adapted work, instead it says: Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image. If including a single work makes your book Adapted Materiel, than you must either release the book under the same license, or else not rely on the CC license. I am not at all sure if such use would make the book Adapted Materiel. If the content could be quoted (perhaps only in part) based on fair use or fair dealing or a similar theory, you would not be relaying on the license. But whether such use is legitimate is always a very fact-bound question, which will depend on various specific facts. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? for a summary of US fair use principles. If the materiel you want to use would not qualify under fair use (or whatever similar principle applies in your jurisdiction), and the book would be considered Adapted Material, then you would have to omit it or put the book under the CC license. I see in The CC case law page the statement that: The atlas was a compilation not a derivative work, so did not need to be licensed under the SA term, Which might apply to your book. If it does, you would not need to place the book under a CC license. Update: On reading CC's detailed wiki page on Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group, LLC I find the statement that Use of a whole work is suggestive of a "compilation" rather than a derivative work subject to the ND/SA terms. attributed to the US District court (DC district) that decided this case in 2014. If that decision were followed, it would seem that the book would not be considered a derivative work and while proper attribution must be provided, and the applicable license must be indicated, the book itself need not be released under CC-BY-SA.