Do digital works need to be sent to the copyright office? In the US, if I release a video game (or other digital work) online do I need to send a physical copy to the Copyright Office?
Not unless you also released it in physical form. First, you don't have to send anything to the copyright office; registration is only required before you actually file an infringement lawsuit. Second, when you do register, the Copyright Office says: What works may be registered with electronic deposits? The following classes of works may be registered in eCO with electronic deposit copies: Unpublished works; Works published only electronically; Published works for which the deposit requirement is ID material (see the Special Deposit Requirements section of Circular 1 for more on ID material); Published works for which there are special agreements requiring the hard copy deposits to be sent separately to the Library of Congress. All other classes of works may be registered via eCO (application and fee payment) but require hard copies of the work(s) being registered. Under part 2, if it was only released electronically the USCO will take electronic deposit.
You automatically have a copyright in any copyritable things you create. So you own copyright over the pictures you sent him (as long as you created them)
All computer programs are not just copyrightable, they are protected by copyright as soon as they are put into fixed form (for example, as soon as I type it on my computer which will save it as a file on a disk). The copyright owner doesn't have to take any actions whatsoever to have a computer program protected by copyright. It’s not just computer programs, even many fonts are copyrighted because they are essentially computer programs. BTW. What I just wrote is also protected by copyright. There are some licenses involved that I agreed to when I submitted it to this website, and which allow the website to publish and you to read this text, but I'm the copyright holder. PS. There is a comment saying “computer programs are not literary works and therefore not copyrightable”. That may have been true or arguable in the 1980’s. It’s not true now. PS. No, stack exchange doesn’t own the copyright to my post, I do. Unless I was an employee of the company and posted on their behalf. Stack exchange needs and has a license to publish this post.
Copyright Prominent at the bottom of the page is: © RealClearPolitics 2015 This is nice because it tells you who you have to approach for a licence. If it wasn't there the material would still be copyright you just wouldn't know who owned the copyright. Questions So: If I'm looking to build an app or write a book and I wish to use statistics, am I allowed to basically use their numbers as long as I cite where it is coming from? No, unless what you do constitutes fair use and I don't think it does. If I do make a profit from it, do I owe any royalties to the original scientists/surveyers? No, but you would owe whatever licence fee you negotiated with the copyright holder, ostensibly RealClearPolitics. Must I ask them for permission? Yes, unless you are OK with running the risk of being sued. Commentary I see books reference hundreds of studies all the time This is because they are generally protected by Academic Fair Use public polls should be open information to everyone The only public poll that I know of is an election and that information is available. What you are looking at is a private poll commissioned by and paid for by RealClearPolitics and it is their intellectual property; why should that "be open information to everyone"? commercial interests may be legally entangling Always
It would be terribly risky for you to simply link another company's terms of service. What if they take their server down? What if they change their terms? You would not even know when exactly the changes were made. Copying their terms means you might run into copyright issues on the text. Either pay a lawyer to write your ToS for you, or see if you can find something in the public domain.
If you do not have permission to make and distribute reproductions of the work, then it is illegal to make and distribute reproductions of the work. US copyright law Indian copyright law
This appears to mean that the author, while retaining copyright, is allowing anyone to make copies without asking permission from the author. This would seem to be similar to a CC-BY license, or perhaps more exactly a CC-BY-ND license, as the author has apparently not granted the right to create modified versions or other derivative works. This does not require one who makes such copies to distribute them free of charge, unless there is another provision not mentioned in the question. Amazon, or anyone else, would be free to sell copies at any price they cared to ask. If the author wanted to limit the sales price, that would take another provision, and might not be enforceable.
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.