In a copyright statement, should the year or copyright holder go first? I have seen both of the following formats used: Copyright © Some Company 2021-2022 Copyright © 2021-2022 Some Company Which one of these is correct? Which should go first? If both are valid, are there situations in which one is preferred?
In the US, the relevant law is 17 USC 401 which provides in relevant part: (a) General Provisions.—Whenever a work protected under this title is published in the United States or elsewhere by authority of the copyright owner, a notice of copyright as provided by this section may be placed on publicly distributed copies from which the work can be visually perceived, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. [emphasis added] (b) Form of Notice.—If a notice appears on the copies, it shall consist of the following three elements: (b)(1) the symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word “Copyright”, or the abbreviation “Copr.”; and (b)(2) the year of first publication of the work; in the case of compilations or derivative works incorporating previously published material, the year date of first publication of the compilation or derivative work is sufficient. The year date may be omitted where a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work, with accompanying text matter, if any, is reproduced in or on greeting cards, postcards, stationery, jewelry, dolls, toys, or any useful articles; and (b)(3) the name of the owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner. (c) Position of Notice.—The notice shall be affixed to the copies in such manner and location as to give reasonable notice of the claim of copyright. The Register of Copyrights shall prescribe by regulation, as examples, specific methods of affixation and positions of the notice on various types of works that will satisfy this requirement, but these specifications shall not be considered exhaustive. (d) Evidentiary Weight of Notice.—If a notice of copyright in the form and position specified by this section appears on the published copy or copies to which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access, then no weight shall be given to such a defendant’s interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages, except as provided in the last sentence of section 504(2). Note that this section lists the three elements in the order 1) symbol or word, 2) year, 3) owner's name. However, it does not explicitly require this order. As the notice is no longer required at all, and as the sole purpose is &quot;to give reasonable notice of the claim of copyright&quot; and to defeat a defense of &quot;innocent infringement&quot;, the order is probably not significant. But I would follow the text of the law and list the elements in teh same order that 17 USC 401 (b) does, that is, word or symbol fist, year second, name third. For example Copyright © 2022 Jane Jones But other forms probably have identical legal significance. Note that &quot;Copyright ©&quot; is a redundancy and perhaps I should not have used it in the example here. But it is what I in fact use, and many commercial publishers do the same. I do it because I think the word will be clearest to many English-speaking people, but the symbol will be clearest internationally, Note also that a notice is no longer legally required. Under US law, until 1 January 1978 (the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Act) any publication without a notice caused the work to enter the public domain at once. After that, until 1 March 1989, any publication without a notice caused the work to enter the public domain in five years, unless the work was registered within that time. Once a work enters the public domain, there is no copyright in that work at all. Ever since 1 March 1989, omission of a notice never causes a work to enter the public domain under US law, and currently, to the best of my understanding, a notice is not legally required in any country in the world, although it has some legal value under US law.
The code is copyrighted. You are not given any permission to use or copy any part of it, nor to create a derivative work based on it. There is no way for you to "make the copyright null". The code was copyrighted in 2005, and the copyright will not expire until 70 years after the death of the author, under US law. The period would vary in some other countries, but in no country that I know of will it expire in the next few years. That the author is dead, or the publisher out of business, does not change this legally. Someone, probably the author's heir, or perhaps whoever bought the remains of the publisher's business, will own the copyright. However, the ideas and programming techniques shown and discussed in the book are not protected, and you may use them freely to write programs, commercial or non-commercial. You need not even acknowledge the book as a source of ideas, although to do so would be nice. Of course, since the author is dead and the publisher not active, if you were to infringe the copyright by copying code from thsi book, there is a reasonable chance that no one would notice, but if someone did notice, the current owner of the copyright could sue you for infringement, and could perhaps win sizable damages. It would be safer to write your own original code using only the general ideas from the book. In future, do not ever assume that you can just take someone else's code (or other creative work, such as a book) and reuse it without permission, unless it is in the public domain, for example because it was published before 1923.
The UK Government released an article last year that explains some of the issues relating to ownership of copyright This article is informative. The headline point: Ownership of literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and film works created by an employee during the course of their employment, automatically vests in their employer by virtue of section 11(2) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The meaning of during the course of their employment has been interpreted by the courts to mean during the course of normal or specifically assigned duties, and that these duties include the creation of intellectual property for the employer. Patents are similarly affected - if the role does not specify or would not imply the creation of patents and other IP, it may not vest in the company automatically. This is a standard clause and is designed to protect the interests of the company, in the event that you create intellectual property as part of your role. Bear in mind here that there's no real need for this property to be created during work hours. That is, if part of your role is to design new software, ownership of that software vests in the company, whether you spent substantial amounts of work hours making it or not. Conversely, if your role does not include, or would be expected to include, the creation of intellectual property, then if you do so - even if it is during work hours - ownership may not necessarily vest in the company. IP you create in the course of your employment will vest in the company in the course of your employment will probably mean: if you are employed to create IP generally, all any IP resulting from your work, or; if you are employed to create a specific work, that work and possibly related works. This is a fairly standard clause, for most companies - I have had several jobs (though none of them technology-related) and they all include some clause to this effect
In principle, there is an original copyright and a copyright of the revised version, but this makes no difference in the duration of a copyright of a natural person which is 70 years from the death of the author. It also has no effect on the duration of the copyright of a corporate work where the legal author is not a natural person, which is 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter. The main reason to update the notice is that giving a copyright notice is one factor necessary to obtain special remedies such as statutory damages and attorneys fees, rather than merely compensatory economic damages. If you don't update the copyright notice for a new version, then these special remedies won't be available when it is the new material that is copied in violation of the copyright law. Updating the copyright notice used to be a much bigger deal when the duration of a copyright was 26 years from publication, and renewable only once for an additional 26 years, as it was pre-1978. Under that regime, a claim of copyright was necessary for a copyright to be present and it was only available for published work, unlike current law under which a copyright with minimal protections arises automatically by operation of law upon the creation of the work.
There is a subtle difference between NSF policy and enforceable obligation. The primary stick that goes with the carrot is being excluded from future funding. Current policy does not generally force material in the public domain, but it is a possibility in "exceptional circumstances". There no doubt is a paper record somewhere in D.C. indicating whether such a codicil was added to any of these grants. NSF generally does not have contracts with individuals, they have contracts with institutions who have relations (typically employer-employee) with individuals, so even if there were a policy requiring works to be put in the public domain, NSF would have to go after the institution, who would have to go after the author. Since that would conflict with longstanding NSF policy on copyright, it is unlikely that they would want to pursue such an approach. The statement that McGraw-Hill Book Company announces that the material, which is copyrighted, will be available for use by authors and publishers on a royalty-free basis on or after April 30, 1970 is not itself a license, it is a suggestion that a license will com into existence. A present-tense declaration "this work is dedicated to the public domain effective April 30, 1970" can be interpreted as a license effective of a date certain. Similarly, "will be available to all publishers for use in English after December 31, 1970, and in translations after December 31, 1975" does not say that it is in the public domain effective of some date. One might say that the copyright statement is simply not well written and the author really intended the books to be in the public domain as of those dates. But without compelling evidence that the book was actually released into the public domain, a court is very unlikely to abrogate a person's property rights.
Copyright protects literary and artistic expression, not facts. So, in a database, the structure of the tables, the construction of the queries and the presentation of the user interface are all subject to copyright. The data stored in each record is not subject to copyright if it is a fact but is subject if it is a literary or artistic work. For example, in the IMDb database, the name of a film, the year it was made, the director’s name, the actors’ names etc. are not copyright, however, the star ratings, the reviews, the table structure, the queries and the user interface all are. For your fossil example, the fossil, where it was found, who found it, when etc. are all non-copyrightable facts. Any photographs of it, drawings of it or scientific writing about it are all copyright because they all involve creative transformation of the fossil. That creativity is key. For the book, if the scanning is automated and the text is generated by OCR then there is no new copyright. If a human makes editing or compositional choices, there is.
A translation is a devivative work - the copyright owner has the exclusive right to these So, yes, translation is prima facie copyright infringement. Strictly speaking, if you translate it, it's a derivative work because you exercised creativity in making the translation; what Google translate does is not a derivative work, it's a copy because there is no creativity. Either way, only the copyright owner can do (or authorise) this. Whether it's legal or not depends on if what you are doing falls within one of the exceptions to the applicable copyright law such as fair use or fair dealing. Attributing the original author does not, of itself, allow translation. Additionally, I'm not able to find the copyright documentation for the site link I provided above. What is "copyright documentation"? Copyright exists the moment a work is created and no further documentation is required. Essentially, I could translate the whole documentation by myself to avoid this problem. No, you can't - see above. If copy-pasting the google translate is illegal, then exactly how much must I edit, move around sentences, change words, and such until the text is no longer plagiarized? All of it. If you were, based on your own knowledge of the software, to write a manual without any copying o the existing manual, that would not be copyright infringement. Is this plagiarism or copyright infringement? It's copyright infringement - plagiarism is an academic misconduct issue not a legal one. where can I check the copyright for the above link? The site you linked has "Copyright © 2020 Acquia, Inc. All Rights Reserved" in the bottom left corner which identifies the copyright holder, the date and prohibits all copying ("all rights reserved"). This isn't necessary but it is helpful. If you really want to do this, contact Acquia, Inc and ask for permission.
A statement by a fictional character is part of the fiction, and so is normally protected by copyright. A short exclamation such as &quot;You are not prepared!&quot; might be ruled to be too short and not sufficiently original to be protected if it were used separately, but that would apply just as much to a short statement that was not a quote from a character. But something like one of Gandalf's speeches on &quot;mercy and pity&quot; to Frodo in Chapter 2 (&quot;The Shadow of the past&quot;) in book 1 of The Lord of the Rings would clearly be protected. The longer and the more distinctive such a text is, the more clearly it would be protected. Whether it is put in the mouth of a character or is part of the narration makes no significant difference. Note, in a copyright sense a statement does not &quot;belong to a particular universe&quot;, rather it belongs to a copyright owner, often the author, or in the case of a video game quite likely thy publisher. As this comment by Kevin mentions, and as I should have mentioned, reproducing a short quotation from a work of fiction, particularly if properly attributed, is quite likely to be fair use. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? for more specific details. See also the threads tagged fair use If a quote is used for a different purpose than the original, in what is called a &quot;transformative&quot; manner in copyright cases, then it is more likely to be held to be fair use. The smaller of a percentage of the source item the quote is, the more likely it is that it will be considered to be a fair use. The less the use of a quote serves as a replacement for the source, or harms the market for the source, the more likely it is to be considered a fair use. See the links above for more detail.