A Brief Explanation of Copyright
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About Copyright
Intellectual Property Rights is the section of law under which Copyright falls. Section 512(c) of The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the section of federal law addressing a hosting company's responsibility to remove infringing content from a site hosted on its servers upon receipt of notice from the content owner identifying the infringing content (known as a Take Down Notice). This formal request is normally issued only after a site owner has first been notified and failed to comply voluntarily.
In plain terms, it is illegal to copy text, photos or images from a website if you did not create the content (or pay someone to create it for you), purchase the right to use it or get permission from the owner to use it.
Copyright is conferred on the person or entity who originated the content in question. Proof is normally the party able to demonstrate the earliest dated and documented use of the content. Virtually all content on the web was created by someone and they are the owner.
A simple rule of thumb: If you did not write it, it's not yours!
Copyright does not extend to the ideas expressed in a work, it applies solely to the unique manner in which the ideas are expressed. No one can claim to own ideas, and anyone is free to adopt the ideas in new works so long as the new work is not a derivative of the original.
Derivative Works
Copyright extends to derivatives of an original work. That means if you take someone else's original photo or writing and make changes to it (including adding or changing a few words, reordering sentences or paragraphs, or using only select portions), it does not become your original work just because it is no longer exactly the same as the original. This rule was established to prevent the ease with which some else's work could be exploited and copyright could be circumvented.
How much do I have to change in order to claim copyright in someone else's work?
Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. Accordingly, you cannot claim copyright to another's work, no matter how much you change it, unless you have the owner's consent. See Circular 14, Copyright Registration for Derivative Works and Compilations.
Whether or not a work qualifies as derivative is determined by two interrelated concepts, 'copying' and 'substantial similarity' as defined below.
COPYRIGHT [copyright]. An exclusive right granted or conferred by the government on the creator of a work to exclude others from reproducing it, adapting it, distributing it to the public, performing it in public, or displaying it in public. Copyright does not protect an abstract idea; it protects only the concrete form of expression in a work. To be valid, a copyrighted work must have originality and possess a modicum of creativity.
DERIVATIVE WORK [copyright]. A work based on a preexisting work that is changed, condensed, recast, or embellished in some way.
COPYING [copyright-patent-trademark]. In copyright law, "copying" denotes two separate but interrelated concepts. To constitute an infringement of copyright, a work must be a "copy" in the sense that it is substantially similar to a copyrighted work, it must have been "copied" from the copyrighted work as opposed to being the result of coincidental, independent production or from being taken from the same source as the copyrighted work. Legal standards for infringement of copyright differ from those for patents and trademarks, neither of which require proof of copying.
McCarthy's Desk Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property