Note: This is from my original blog, written December 2008. This is US-centric. I’ve decided to revive some of them.
Alright, I’m a little pissy about intellectual property. Digital content is ridiculously easy to share. For people growing up with digital content, there’s lots of temptation to use readily available materials to be creative (animated music videos come to mind). Uh, yeah. That’s illegal.
So, I’m going to do a nice series on the topic. I expect something in the format of:
- Copyright: protections for creative endeavors.
- Trademarks: protecting identifiers (slogans, logos, and colors).
- Patents: protects inventions and discoveries.
- Fair use: staying out of trouble
- Alternatives: public domain and creative commons.
Copyright protects artistic work including literary, dramatic/choreographed, musical, pictorial/graphic/sculptural, film/audiovisual, sound recordings, and architectural. It should be stated that copyright does not protect ideas, slogans, non-tangible works (like not recording a dance routine), and works that solely use public content (units of measurement, for example).
In the U.S., copyright is granted to every applicable thing created, but the copyright will need to be registered for legal considerations. Copyright extends 90 years from creation or 120 years from publication (whichever’s shorter). In terms of the owner of the copyright, that’s usually the creator(s). If you were to buy a painting, the artist probably did not also sell the copyrights to it.
So, what does a copyright protect? These are the exclusive rights that are granted to the copyright holder:
- To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords.
- To prepare derivative works based upon the work.
- To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.
- To publicly perform the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works.
- To publicly display the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
Yep. You cannot legally copy and distribute works (no P2P downloads), create works based on a work (like, oh, fanfiction), or have it readily available to the public (damn, no projecting WALL•E onto buildings). These exclusive rights are not dependent on who makes money, so that “no money = okay” excuse can get someone into trouble.
Alright then, how can there be so much blatant use of copyrighted materials? One option is that someone wrote the copyright holder and was granted permission (more effective for a lone musician than RCA).
But, in addition to the rights there’s also a list of limitations in copyright. These include: fair use, reproduction by archives and libraries, and creation of an accessible copy for a person with a disability that would not be able to access the material.
