It’s good that you’re asking, and I totally understand that you see other people posting copyrighted materials apparently without the author’s permission and you assume there must be some principle that allows them to do this.
As @tser says, a good key is a lot more than a compilation of facts. Writing the key combines knowledge and judgement and requires a lot of work. But there are some circumstances where you can legally reproduce or translate all or part of an existing key.
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It’s OK to reproduce a whole key if you know that it is out of copyright in all relevant countries, which here might be both Iceland (where it was originally published) and the United States (where iNat is based). As copyright takes a very long time to expire, any out-of-copyright key is likely to be of limited value.
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It’s also OK to reproduce it if you get permission from the copyright holder (i.e. the author) and abide by any restrictions they apply, such as no commercial use.
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A third case would be if the key was public domain from the outset (e.g. official works by U.S. federal government employees), or published with an explicit free license, such as Creative Commons.
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Even if none of those apply, you may be able to reproduce a small part of the key under a concept such as “fair use” (U.S.), which allows you to reproduce a small excerpt of a copyright work. When I paste a couplet from a key into an iNat comment to help explain an ID choice, I’m relying on the fair use copyright exception. Other jurisdictions have similar provisions, e.g. “fair dealing” in U.K. law, but their provisions differ quite a bit.
Of course, everyone working in science uses a large amount of information created by others as input for their own creative works, and sometimes it can be hard to discern the exact boundary of infringement. Consider two examples:
- You take the published key you mentioned, translate it into English, update the names to reflect recent research, and republish it, maybe as a journal post.
- You read the published descriptions and older keys for Icelandic land snails plus the recent research on phylogeny for these genera; you examine specimens in the field and museum collections; you take measurements and photos yourself and compare them to the descriptions; based on this work you write a wholly new key.
In my (non-lawyer) view, Scenario 1 is good example of a derivative work, where pretty much every country’s copyright law would require you to get the author’s permission. In Scenario 2, the new work is entirely your own, even though some of your knowledge came from reading copyrighted works. Obviously there are many other scenarios, but if what you want to create results in your using parts of an earlier work (e.g. your key is a modification of an earlier one, or you want to use drawings from the earlier key), then the best approach is to explain that to the author and ask for their permission to use the material.
Every reputable publisher will require authors to demonstrate that they have the right to reproduce material that appears to have been copied from other sources. This comes up most often with figures. A surprising number of authors will tell a publisher things like “I’m sure author X won’t mind”, “But I was a co-author on the original paper”, “But the paper was written by other people at my employer”. All of these scenarios require explicit permission.
If you publish something yourself (e.g. via a journal or blog post) you’re still bound by the same laws. Lots of people ignore copyright law, but I’d suggest it’s better to try to respect it.
The positive side of all this is that almost every scientist is actually very happy to grant permission of this sort, and glad to know that their work is being used by others. The biggest obstacle might be if the original work was issued by a for-profit publisher that has an unrealistic idea of their ability to charge a licensing fee for a 50-year-old malacology article.
Even the process of asking for permission will help you make connections with people working in the same field, which may as big a benefit as getting the right to reuse the original key.
