If i'm going to sell study guides or flashcard based on books required by my school to others who are using the same books, will I be violating any copyright law?
If yes, how can I not violate any copyright law in case I will sell it? Thanks.
The answer is always maybe or maybe not. If your flash cards are simply brief snipets of information that should be remembered from the books, then maybe that is not a violation. For instance, if the book is a physics text book and your flash cards have various laws of physics on them, then that would clearly not be a copyright violation because laws of physics are not copyrightable. But if the books are literary novels and your flash cards are nothing except important excerpts from those novels, and the entire deck of flash cards would be almost the entire novel, then you will probably have trouble.
In short, if you ever sell anything that is based on someone else's work, you will save yourself money and headache in the long run by sitting down with an actual intellectual property lawyer with your actual product.
Good luck.
It depends in large measure what portion of the works you may be copying. You could write flashcards and study guides which don't quote a singe word. Your private and independent analysis is your. When you begin to copy and then sell or distributute is when you need to be careful.
As a practical matter, if you intend to link your study guides and flashcards to particular texts, you should seek permission from the publisher of those texts with the help of an attorney who can make sure you get the rights you need to proceed.
If you are granted permission, you will have much more leeway with respect to the amount of material that can be used, how and where you can advertise your materials. You could also end up with not only permission from, but the support of, the publisher.
If you try to proceed without appropriate permission, you could end up in court like Class Notes -- i.e., the folks who created Einstein Notes, and find yourself having to file for bankruptcy (see links below).
Good luck to you!
