Can copyrighted work be distributed for free if it was done so by the owner previously? Once upon a time a UK music band put one of their songs on their website for free download. Time has passed, the website has changed drastically and the song is not available there anymore. Neither it is sold by anyone anywhere. Would it be illegal for those who downloaded the song when it was available, to put it now on file sharing resources for free download?
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.
Well, actually, fair use is maximally relevant. Copyright means, put simply, DO NOT COPY. Citing or not is irrelevant (plagiarism is a whole other non-legal kettle of fish). Technically, what you describe is violation of copyright. However, under section 107 of Title 17 (the copyright law), you could attempt to defend yourself against an infringement suit on the basis that your action was "fair use". See this LSE q&amp;a for the essentials of fair use.
No It says right on the page you linked: These downloads are not public domain, as they are parts of content that has already been licensed and distributed. Although using these downloads may be permissible as long as the project itself falls under the rule of "Fair Use," it is ill-advised to use these downloads for any project intended for profitable gain or commercial advertisement, unless otherwise stated by Kyutwo.com.
Easy. Don't put your name on it in the first place and state "The copyright owner grants a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to anyone provided that it is not attributed to the author."
Go to court and find out There is no doubt that humming a tune and recording it (or performing it in public) is a derivative work - a right reserved to the copyright owner. Whether it is fair use depends on the specifics of the case. From the tweet, we simply don’t have enough information, however, at a guess, it is probably not fair use. Fair use in law is Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include: the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors. Most people miss “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research,” - if you aren’t doing one of those things then you start behind the 8-ball when yo move to the 4 factor test. Note that the “criticism, comment, news reporting,” etc. must be about the copyrighted work - I can’t use your copyrighted work to, for example, parody a politician unless you are that politician. Many people have completely the wrong idea about what copyright infringement and fair use actually are, in part because the use of music on YouTube is allowed, not because it’s fair use but, because YouTube was smart enough to negotiate and pay for a permissive licence with music producers. For a full explanation, see this video.
It is, in most jurisdictions, not a crime to download YouTube videos. For criminal law, the answer is that it is not illegal. In many jurisdictions, downloading music or video of any kind from the internet is not a crime. Thus, police has no power to punish you for downloading, and even less power to shutdown such "downloader" websites. YouTube's Terms of Service seem to disallow such downloads so YouTube has the right to terminate the agreement with the downloader. They may prevent you from viewing any more videos, for example. However, I think Google does not even have a technical measure in place to do that. Google is not interested in preventing you from using YouTube (its servers can handle that) and that is pretty much the only punishment it can use. Google could use the Terms of Services to say that the downloader-websites are breaking them and thus should not have access to YouTube. The websites could be sued for breaking the Terms of Services (and the court could order them to stop) and Google can block those websites from accessing YouTube by technical measures. It appears it did so in at least one case. Google could sue you (or the websites) for advertisement revenue loss, but it is unlikely. In theory, Google loses advertisement revenue from the video playbacks you would have done on YouTube but did not play because you downloaded the video and played it offline (contrary to the Terms of Service). Google might attempt to sue a downloader website on this basis and try to make it give it money. It would be difficult for Google to prove that it deserves such money, though. I cannot imagine how it would prove that "you would have played the video online, again, with advertisements, if you didn't download it. Note that when you replay a video from browser cache, advertisements do not replay. Why Google doesn't sue downloader-website more often? It's expensive. Google could pay a lot of money to shut down a website via court order but if it really wants to do so, they can apply a technical measure (such as IP block) instead. It is much cheaper and has the same effect. This may change in the near future. There's a some talk around about European court rulings and directives that may change this. It is quite possible that in the near future, even viewing illegally uploaded music on YouTube will be criminal. I find this doubtful because of the difficulty of proving knowledge ("How was I supposed to know that it wasn't an official clip?"). As for whether downloading to a file (as opposed to downloading to the browser cache) will become criminal, I really doubt that.
You can report it to the publisher(s) Protection of copyright is a matter for the individual rights holder: some (I’m looking at you Disney) are vigilant, thorough and draconian in protecting their rights, others don’t care at all. Unless you are the rights holder it’s none of your business. In much the same way that the guy charging your neighbour for 4 hours gardening but being long gone in 2 isn’t. If you like your neighbour or feel duty bound to do something, you tell them and then leave it to them what they do with it. This is not a matter for the authorities as it doesn’t rise to the level of criminal copyright infringement. Just like the gardener above, this isn’t a crime.
Generally, as the copyright holder, you can grant anyone a license to any or all of the copyright rights you have over your work (copying, distribution, derivative works, etc.). If you want to articulate unambiguously exactly what rights you are licensing, and optionally require attribution, you could use one of the Creative Commons licenses, which are designed for creative works. Some that would likely be a good fit for you are: Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) - Grants full rights to any recipient to use, modify, and distribute. Requires that all reuse mentions you somewhere in the work's credits. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA) - Grants the same full rights as the CC BY license except that any new derivative work made by a recipient must also be licensed under the CC BY-SA license. With the CC BY license, another person's modifications could be under a different license; under CC BY-SA, all modifications must be licensed under CC BY-SA when distributed, so the work and all its future transformations must be shared under the CC BY-SA license, forever (until your copyright expires, of course). This falls under the broad umbrella of copyleft licenses. CC0 - Functionally places your work in the public domain where it can be used by anyone with no restrictions (other than moral rights). CC0 allows you to renounce all claim to copyright on your work (to whatever extent possible in your jurisdiction), and/or freely license all the rights you hold in your work to the maximum extent possible (for jurisdictions where renouncing your copyright is not possible). There are also Creative Commons licenses that disallow commercial use and disallow the creation of derivative works, but you are probably not interested in those, since you want to grant full rights. One other factor to consider is whether you want to license the musical work itself or only the sound recording. By default, you might only be licensing the recording, which means other people cannot record a new cover of your music. (See Does a Creative Commons license allow me to record a cover of a song recording?) If you want to allow that, simply make a separate declaration when you license the work, saying something like, "In addition to the sound recording(s), I also license the underlying musical work under identical terms, to allow recipients to record their own covers based on this song."