If you express ideas and facts in your own words, you should always give appropriate credit to the sources in which you found them. It is common courtesy to do so, and not doing so could constitute a violation of the Copyright Act. What you have created may constitute a derivative work pursuant to the Copyright Act, unless you have obtained license or permission from the copyright holder to create the work. It may also constitute plagiarism under state common law. Paraphrasing other people’s work may also constitute plagiarism under state common law, and may run afoul of misappropriation statutes.
As Richard Stallman says, “Non-lawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle, and function similarly. Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues. “[1] X Research source Trademarks, for example, forbid using certain words, marks, symbols, and so on within certain contexts to protect consumers from misrepresentation. Copyright would not prevent you from, for example, writing some new text editor software and calling it “Microsoft Text Editor”, but trademark law would.
In nearly all jurisdictions, including the United States, and all other Berne Convention signatories, it is not necessary for a work to have an explicit copyright notice for it to be copyrighted. [2] X Research source Stim 2005, p. 257. "[T]he Berne Convention [. . . ] specifies that no formalities—such as copyright notice—are necessary for gaining [copyright] protection. “ It is also not necessary for copyright in a work to be registered; this simply makes it easier to be compensated in court. Without an explicit dedication to the public domain, assume that it is still under copyright. There is a quirk in the United States’ implementation of the Berne Convention: works first published before 1978 without a copyright notice may be public domain in the United States. [3] X Research source Scott §2. 42[E]. “A work published prior to January 1, 1978 [. . . ] without the prescribed copyright notice or with a defective notice was injected into the public domain, and the author lost all copyright protection. “ Works published under copyright notice are no longer covered by copyright after 75 years. They become public domain material. Works published by the US Government are public domain no matter when they were published.
Scanning something yourself does not, by itself, give you a new copyright over anything. You cannot scan a photograph from, say, a magazine and then put it on the Internet; the copyright would still reside with the author of the work. The flip-side of this is that scanning a work which is in the public domain would not, in many jurisdictions, give you the copyright over the resulting scan. Taking a screenshot of a video or a computer program does not generate a new copyright. The copyright in the resulting screenshot would still be held by the copyright holder of the original video or computer program. Some non-creative things are not copyrightable, for example, a plain text logo in a generic font. Neither are simple geometric shapes. But don’t rely on this unless you are certain.
Some uses of text under “fair use” are teaching, critiques, comments, reporting, and research. It permits, for example, limited quoting of copyrighted material. In some jurisdictions, it would allow creating a copy for personal use (such as a backup)[5] X Research source UKCS (2009), Fair Dealing: Permitted Acts “Copying parts of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or of a typographical arrangement of a published edition for the purpose of research or private study is allowed . . . “ .
This means that fan-fiction, drawings of characters from copyrighted works, and so on are all technically copyright infringements. Sometimes copyright holders turn a blind eye to this sort of thing, but unless it has been explicitly authorised, don’t count on this being the case. Stock Characters, on the other hand, can not be copyrighted or trademarked.
One of the most frequent errors that get people in trouble is in using free photo sites. Just because the photo is on one of these sites does not mean the person who posted it there had the right to do so. Even if it says “Some Rights Reserved,” meaning you are only required to post attribution, if the photo was originally copyrighted, the copyright remains. When you see “Some Rights Reserved” you need to carefully check what that means. Usually, this is a Creative Commons license or other similar copyleft license, but you must adhere to the conditions of that particular application. Not all items under Creative Commons are treated the same. In nearly all cases, Creative Commons-licensed works require attribution of the original creator. They may also have additional restrictions, such as prohibiting commercial use of the work, or requiring that copies be distributed under a similar license.
