copyright
is it allowed to make tutorials out of copyrighted material?
<p>I have been reading a lot of books about the IT world in general. I learned from those books.</p>
<p>Now I wish to create some tutorials which will be available in public in form of a website.</p>
<p>Suppose I intend to copy some sentences (from books or copyrighted material that does not allow copying neither a part), what if I copy them, but rephrase them in a different way? (the way I understood better for example, or add some more examples for that topic)</p>
<p>Is that allowed, to rephrase a coprighted part of text so I can use it in public domain.</p>

<p>Ideas are not protected by copyright, only arrangements of words are protected. If you &quot;rephrase&quot; by only a minor change of wording, leaving much of the wording intact, that is still a copyright infringement unless an exception such as fair use or fair dealing applies (and that seems a bit doubtful in this case).</p>
<p>If you &quot;rephrase&quot; so that the wording is quite different, even though the idea is the same, there is probably no infringement.</p>
<p>Copying elements of computer code or other IT commands that are essential to making an example work is not infringement. Where there is only one or a very small number of ways to naturally express a fact, copying such expression is not infringement, as facts are not protected by copyright.</p>
<p>Adding  examples but keeping significant wording unchanged is still likely to be infringement.</p>

<p>There is a fine line between infringement and not. It gets blurrier by fair use, fair dealing and other exceptions.</p>
<p>For example, me quoting David's answer verbatim, in part or in total, would be per se copyright infringement. If I use that to criticize one point of the answer and I take no more than necessary, my infringement is fair use - and not to be treated as an infringement.</p>
<p>And then there is academic quotation style, bypassing the need for actual citation or copying: David says in his otherwise excellent answer, that fair use isn't ever an infringement on the copyright. However, fair use is used as an affirmative defense most often - and some few times, something that was thought to be fair use isn't, and thus it is still an infringement. For example, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oAmykML1S4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Good Mythical Morning</a> took a commercial photo of a prison and discussed <em>the depicted prison</em>, but never the photo. That is <strong>not</strong> <em>criticism of the photo</em> and not transformative <em>to the photo</em>. As photo licenses for the photo are available they infringed on the market, the work was a creative photo, so it was copyright infringement. That example case by the way was ended <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiVr4XpKE7A" rel="nofollow noreferrer">of an error of the lawyer</a> - not an error of judgment.</p>
