Can I make a derivative work from a book that was written 150 years ago I read an article that says that copyrights last life of author plus 70 years. Can I make a derivative work from a book that was written 150 years ago without making a copyright infringement?
I assume you are talking about United States federal copyright law. You can freely use any: material published before 1923 material published between 1923 and 1963 for which the copyright was not renewed material explicitly placed in the public domain material not copyrightable (such as any US government publication) material whose copyright has been abandoned (for example the author died with no heir)
What you're talking about is called black-box reverse engineering. It can be done, and as long as you are meticulous in your record keeping the fact that it has been done should be an appropriate defence against copyright infringement. But that doesn't help against patent claims - while in copyright cases the fact that code has or has not been directly copied is critical, in patent cases it its irrelevant: if you use a patented method, it's a violation. You therefore will need to be careful about any patents that may have been issued to the original author, as well as avoiding copying.
Regardless of whether the first copyright holder is the author (always a natural person) or an employer (natural or non-natural), the copyright under British law expires 70 years after the death of the author. British law makes a distinction between the author of a work and the owner of a copyright that is not present in U.S. copyright law. This gives the author of the work "moral rights" which are absent in U.S. copyright law and also changes the analysis of how long a copyright lasts. Under Section 9 of the law, the author of the work is always a natural person according to the rules set forth there, and if no natural person can be associated with the work, it is a work of unknown authorship. Section 11 governs who owns a work, not who its author is, so the fact that a work is made for hire under a corporation does not mean that the author of the work is the corporation. Indeed, by definition, the author of the work cannot be a corporation. If no individual can be associated with a corporate work it is simply a work by an unknown author. A work by an unknown author enters the public domain 70 years after it is created, or 70 years after publication if it is first published within 70 years after its creation, pursuant to Section 12. The authorship of a work is fixed under Section 9 at the moment of its creation, so neither the first owner of the copyright (under Section 11) nor an assignment of ownership of the copyright from the author or first copyright owner to someone else (in your scenario where an author transfers ownership of the copyright to a corporation) changes the author of work. Hence, neither the fact that a work is made for hire, nor the fact that the author transfers ownership of the copyright, changes the duration of the copyright.
It depends on the game and what you copy. Games are an utter nightmare when it comes to IP law as so many parts of them cannot be copyrighted. Game rules for example cannot be copyrighted, nor can the concept itself. Some things can be copyrighted or trademarked. You cannot use the following: Names Written elements- while the rules themselves can't be copyrighted, rulebooks can Artwork and other visual elements Miniatures designed for the game Original characters Try to avoid these and the Hasbro lawyers should leave you alone.
No. That clause does not give other users a licence to reproduce the work (other than what is necessary to access or use it) or create derivative works. The copyright owner has the exclusive right to do those things. (See 17 USC 106.) The clause you quote only indicates that other users can "access" (download for viewing) your "information" and use it, too. It doesn't give away any of your exclusive copyright in the work. You do grant Facebook a licence to do certain things with your work in section 2.1 of the Terms of Service, though.
You don't say where you are located. Copyright laws are different in different countries, am going to assume US laws. Under US law, a faithful digitization of a book does not get a new copyeight, see Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 25 F. Supp. 2d 421 (S.D.N.Y. 1998) and thw Wikipedia article about that case (On the issue of mrequired originality, see also FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC. v. RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE COMPANY, INC. (No. 89-1909.) (1991) which dealt with copying a telephone directory.) The court in Bridgeman held that: It is uncontested that Bridgeman's images are substantially exact reproductions of public domain works, albeit in a different medium. The images were copied from the underlying works without any avoidable addition, alteration or transformation. Indeed, Bridgeman strives to reproduce precisely those works of art. ... The mere reproduction of a work of art in a different medium should not constitute the required originality for the reason that no one can claim to have independently evolved any particular medium.'&quot; As discussed above, the law requires &quot;some element of material alteration or embellishment&quot; to the totality of the work. At bottom, the totality of the work is the image itself, and Bridgeman admittedly seeks to duplicate exactly the images of the underlying works. ... [O]ne need not deny the creativity inherent in the art of photography to recognize that a photograph which is no more than a copy of the work of another as exact as science and technology permit lacks originality. That is not to say such a feat is trivial, simply not original. The more persuasive analogy is that of a photocopier. Surely designing the technology to produce exact reproductions of documents required much engineering talent, but that does not make the reproductions copyrightable. The Bridgeman court was actually construing UK law, but the earthlier phase of Bridgeman i and the SCOTUS case of Feist show the same result under UIS law. Note that books and other works published before 1925 are now out of copyright in the US. Copyright can also be lost ion other ways, such as publishing without a copyright notice before the effective date of the 1976 act, and failure to properly renew a work published in the US before 1964. Assuming that the book is not under copyright, neither the library nor anyone else has a US copyright in the PFD. Unless the library imposes some additional restriction by contract, any such PDF may be copied or shared freely. It may even be sold or rented. And the validity of such an additional agreement would be questionable, but since the question does not mention such an agreement, I will not go into that further.
In the US, the author would be able to wind an infringement lawsuit against the re-publisher. Title 17, the US copyright law codified, grants the author the exclusive right to authorize republication, and does not require that a person use their real name. The argument "It was on the internet, it's in the public domain" is utterly without legal merit. The same goes for the assertion that a person loses his rights if he is uncontactable. The author has stated the terms of the license, so there isn't even a reasonable argument that the infringement is innocent (unknowing: "I thought it was with permission). There is no requirement that you have to allow a potential user to hassle you about the license terms. The one thing that is special regarding anonymous and pseudonymous works is that under 17 USC 302, "copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first". For a work whose author is identified, copyright "endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death". This assumes that the host site has not preempted author's license: Stack Exchange, for example, preempts an author's exclusive right, so you can copy stuff from here accorting to the SE terms of usage.
The text of an ancient manuscript would indeed not be covered by copyright. A translation into a modern language normally would be protected by copyright. (Unless it is purely a machine or algorithmic translation.) The formatting of a publication could ber protected by copyright, but only if it includes some significantly original element. (In the US, and in many but not all other countries, only original works or original aspects of works may be protected by copyright. Thus where the copyright is for format the format must include an original element or elements.) If the format was a normal one for the type of publication, ther would be no original content to protect, and so no copyright at all. A work alleged to infringe a copyright on the format would need to be shown to have copied an original element or elements of the prior publication's format.