A Short & Happy Guide to Copyright
Author:
Murray, Michael D.
Edition:
2nd
Copyright Date:
2022
16 chapters
have results for Happy Guide to Copyright
Introduction 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The purpose of this guide is to orient and acclimate you to the structure, public policy, issues, and vocabulary of the area of copyright law. If you are using this guide while taking a copyright or intellectual property survey course, you will immediately recognize that a guide of this size cannot replace your course text and the supplemental materials assigned by your professor. But it is worth your time to use this guide in the following ways:
- If you are a law student purchasing this guide, you obviously are interested in the legal issues that arise in copyright law, the laws and legal standards that apply to answer the issues, and the information needed to make predictions about probable outcomes of copyright disputes. If you are a practitioner seeking to expand your knowledge with the hopes of expanding your practice, you have come to realize that a good portion of your existing or potential clients will continue to have questions that implicate copyright law. If you are simply curious to learn more about this field, read on with the assurance that no matter what your level of interest and experience, this guide is written with the assumption that you most likely do not have any prior knowledge about American intellectual property law or copyright law in particular. You need not even know that much about the law to pick up the ideas and concepts of this area. This is an open guide for the curious.
- Lawyers exploring the modern legal landscape will find that many areas of commerce, science and technology, literature, entertainment, and the arts depend on lawyers who have more than a passing understanding of copyright law. The interest and attention we pay to creative, entertainment, and intellectual business matters raises the profile of legal problems that affect people who work and do business in these areas. Even focusing on one area—the arts and entertainment industry—reveals that artists, media companies, internet companies, publishing businesses, museums and galleries, insurers, government regulators, everyday consumers, and creative users and re-users of content encounter copyright issues on a daily basis. As a result, no knowledge of copyright law will go to waste in a lawyer’s practice. Fortunately, although learning one more area of the law is never easy for the young lawyer starting out in practice, with copyright law the study need not be a burden, because copyright...
- To educate yourself as to your future clients’ rights, potential liabilities, and options and opportunities regarding legal problems in copyright. Whether you plan to specialize in copyright or intellectual property, or simply want to be available to your firm or law office as an attorney who can take on a novel problem in an exciting and potentially high-profile and high-dollar-value area of your firm’s or office’s practice, this book will be useful to you. In many instances, copyright law has defined rights and responsibilities and created options and opportunities that are not known or fully understood by the average lawyer.
- To get up to speed on the biggest issues of copyright law, and the black letter law addressing those issues, so as to help you master this area for your copyright, art law, or intellectual property survey course.
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Chapter 1. Copyright Basics 42 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Copyright is a wonderful, complex, sometimes mysterious area of law. In my experience as a law professor and legal author, I have encountered many students with a strong desire to learn something of copyright law. Many of you might plan to work with media giants, game designers, and entertainment companies. You might want to work with producers of motion pictures and television programming, and with online content providers. You would be happy to represent artists, authors, publishers, coders, and persons consuming or re-using content. You also would like to be useful to your firm and its clients regarding copyright protection for your clients’ products and works well beyond the arts and entertainment fields. Copyright law addresses all of these questions and curiosities. We will begin with some basic issues.
- I have to backtrack a little bit and say that registration is required if you want to sue someone over a copyright in a United States federal court. And that is an important thing to remember, because you cannot sue anyone over a copyright dispute in a state court. You just can’t. Copyright law is federal law. There is no such thing as state copyright law, and state courts have no power (no jurisdiction) to hear any suit involving copyright law. Students studying jurisdiction in civil procedure and constitutional law should know that copyright is an area of complete federal preemption (for the rest of you, you can just smile and nod). For our purposes here, it’s federal court or nothing, and for that, you have to register your copyright.
- This is a long list of things not covered because, once again, copyright law is a public policy driven set of laws, and the policy is: benefit the general public. Ideas and concepts can be copied, mimicked, emulated, and appropriated because the freedom to do those things improves the general welfare. It expands the topics of discussion by allowing people to think and express their thoughts on all manner of topics without the fear that you are repeating ideas and concepts that someone else has already thought about and talked about. Processes, procedures, methods, and recipes are not subject to copyright because they are useful, they benefit many members of society beyond the author, and the law wants them to be repeated and republished without the limitations of copyright. The term of copyright protection is long—the lifetime of the author and seventy more years after her death is the copyright term for a copyright owned and controlled by the author herself—and the law does not...
- No registration is required. If you heard something different, console yourself with the fact that United States copyright law used to require registration. The law changed when the United States passed its latest, massive copyright overhaul, the Copyright Act of 1976. After this, in the early 1980’s, the United States actively aligned its copyright law with the copyright laws of most of the rest of the nations of this world, who govern themselves according to the international copyright rules found in the Berne Convention. The Berne Convention does not require registration of copyrights, so now, neither does U.S. law.
- But there is a reason why authors and copyright owners still use the logo, “© year Author Name,” and it is a good reason: if you use the notice, you will get protection from a potential infringer who might claim, “I didn’t have any idea that this work was copyrighted.” True, that’s not a defense that works every time—it is a little like the criminal defendant who swears to the judge, “I had no idea that armed robbery was illegal.” But in certain circumstances the defense of innocent infringement does mitigate the copyright defendant’s damages, and you can avoid that reduction in damages if you put a copyright notice on your work. You don’t have to register the work before you put on the copyright notice; the copyright itself attaches at the moment you determine the work to be completed.
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Title Page 2 results
Chapter 8. Works Made for Hire and Copyright Ownership 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Note, too, that this is a new innovation in United States copyright law since 1977. 1977 refers to the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Act that overhauled the whole United States copyright code. Before 1977, copyright to works were to transfer to the purchasers of the works. If you bought a painting, you also bought the copyright to the painting; or so went the presumption. You could rebut the presumption by agreement—inserting a clause in the sales agreement to the effect that, “In this sale of the painting, buyer will receive the copyright to the painting”—but you had to do something affirmative to rebut the presumption. Since 1977, the opposite presumption is made, that the copyright to the work did transfer to the purchaser of the work the two agreed to include the copyright in the sale.
- If you are not sure of a worker’s status, and you want to own the copyright to the work without question, whether the analysis turns toward independent contractor status rather than employee status, then there is a simple solution: just buy the copyright. Copyrights can be transferred from one person to another by a sale or assignment. A contract to sell, license, or assign a copyright does not have anything to do with the parties’ employment status any more than a contract to purchase a used car would have anything to do with the buyer’s and seller’s employment status. An employer who has her doubts about the common law agency status of a worker should contract with the worker separately to purchase not only the works she produces but also the copyrights to the works. The two are separate—the work and the copyright to the work, as discussed below. If you separately buy the copyright, you’ll own and control it and need never worry over the common law agency test. You can insert this...
- There are three kinds of copyright ownership: sole ownership, joint ownership, and works made for hire. The copyright law states that by default, the “author” is the initial copyright owner at creation. An exception is category 3 of ownership, works made for hire, discussed above. In addition, copyrights can be transferred, which is referred to as a sale, assignment, and transfer. (To make it sound legalistic, use all three terms in your agreement to sell or purchase a copyright). The owner or transferee may be a person, or a business, or a corporation.
- (A word to the wise: if you encounter any artists who sold works in the pre-1977 time frame, please break the news to them gently that they probably transferred the copyrights to their works to the purchasers of their works, unless they affirmatively wrote the copyright transfer out of the sales agreement. Finding out that these copyrights are gone tends to make these artists freak out a little).
- Note that copyright theory in the United States separates a work (the item) from its copyright (the right to copy or make derivative works from the original work). Thus, you can sell a work—a painting, for example—without selling, transferring, or assigning the copyright over the original creation embodied in the painting. This means you retain the control over who, if anyone, gets to copy the painting or make derivative works from the painting. The purchaser of the painting does not have this right unless you sell him the copyright along with the painting.
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Chapter 9. Fair Uses 112 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Fair use is an honorable, public policy-driven, First Amendment-guaranteed right. Fair use should be understood so that it can be enjoyed by all. Those who know can make their copies and use them fairly; those who don’t will know that they are running the risk and are subject to the consequences. Unfortunately, in an effort to be fair to all sides of this issue—the owners of copyrights, the potential consumers of copyrighted works, the potential fair users of copyrighted content, and to the public at large who would like to be enriched and educated by new works—the law has contrived a full-bodied set of rules and criteria that are very complicated and whose operation is difficult to predict. For that reason, do not be surprised if you or others you deal with, even copyright lawyers, cannot give you a completely definitive, straight up Yes-No answer to many fair use questions. At best, copyright lawyers can make educated predictions, and at worst, educated guesses. But knowledge is...to
- A fair use exception has been included in copyright law for as long as there has been recognizable copyright law. It was including in the English copyright law of the eighteenth century (the Statute of Anne ). It was adopted into American copyright law in the early nineteenth century. Today, fair use law reflects the codification of Section 107 of the 1976 Copyright Act that provides four criteria that are to be balanced in a case-by-case analysis of the facts and situation of the dispute. (Note that balancing and case-by-case analysis are code words for lawyers that mean no one is going to be able to give you a straight up Yes-No answer on a fair use question, but we’ll charge you for an educated prediction or guess anyway).
- The transformative test has changed copyright law, and it has become the defining standard for fair use. Copyright law seeks first to promote new, original expression in the arts and literature, and second to allow other public interest activities such as education, research, archiving, news reporting, and comment and criticism of existing works. Transformation requires the copyist to fulfill these objectives. The duplication of works just to show off their same creative, artistic, or literary virtues in a new time, a new place, a new mode or medium of communication, or for a new audience does not fulfill the goals of copyright. No new and original expression results from simple replication of the same communication and expression found in the original. The derivative works doctrine gives those rights to the original author or artist, not to the public at large.
- After reading eight chapters about how the law has tightened the screws and bolted shut the doors and windows against unauthorized copying of original, creative works, you may be wondering why the law built in a rather significant escape hatch for would-be copyists. The answer lies in the public policy of copyright protection: copyright must benefit the public, and members of the public benefit from expansive opportunities to both express themselves and consume the expression of others. When copyright builds walls around content, it excludes the public from free, unrestrained repetition and repurposing of protected expression. Add to this equation the First Amendment public policy that protects and encourages open, robust, unfettered expression in this country, and you arrive at the answer: fair use becomes the public’s safety valve or escape hatch from copyright monopoly protection.
- [T]he fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
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Chapter 4. Scènes à Faire and Merger 34 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The originality and creativity requirements and the idea-expression distinction lead to two doctrines of copyright law called the . The doctrines are directly related to each other, and in some copyright situations they overlap to restrict the kinds of subject matter that may become subject to copyright. The breakdown as far as it can be delineated is as follows:
- As noted above, only an author’s particularly original and creative expressions of facts and ideas of the world and things in the world can achieve copyright protection. This limitation extends to the expression or “depiction” of abstract concepts such as truth, faith, fidelity, and wisdom, and to the expression or depiction of more concrete facts, such as the common appearance or attributes of a natural subject. In the literary arts, no one can obtain a copyright monopoly on the words necessary to communicate an idea or concept. In the visual arts, no one can obtain a copyright monopoly on the depiction of the actual appearance of Oscar Wilde, or a realistic depiction of a tiger that features the animal with orangish fur and black slashing stripes because these are characteristics common to all tigers and necessary to include in the work so that the work can communicate the concept of a “tiger” to the viewer. In most cases, the words that are associated with certain concepts and...
- in copyright law parallels scènes à faire. Merger holds that if there are a limited number of ways to express a concept or idea, then copyright will not afford one author with a monopoly over those limited ways. Copyright law states that in these circumstances the idea and the expression have merged, so that neither one will fall within one author’s copyright, and both the idea and the expression will be free to all to use and exploit. Merger is easier to track in literary contexts because there are just so many ways to express a concept in a given language, but it is also used for visual expressions of ideas in situations where a certain depiction is deemed to be both necessary and inevitable, as in taking a photograph of a bottle of Skyy Vodka that must depict the actual bottle of Skyy Vodka.
- Copyright will exclude from an author’s or artist’s copyright the portion of the work that is deemed to be scènes à faire or which is subject to the merger doctrine and is therefore “merged” with the idea or concept of the scene. If these doctrines did not exist, much creative, original expression would be foreclosed directly because it contained stock scenes, stock character-types, or standard depictions, and an even broader swath of expression would be foreclosed because it would be viewed as a derivative work of an existing work, and the original copyright holder owns the right to create or authorize works that are derivative of or abstracted from her original work (see Chapter 7 on “Derivative Works”).
- An artist who produces a work that has many uncopyrightable elements—either because the work is non-fictional and contains many facts, or scientific and contains processes or procedures, or because the artist incorporated scènes à faire or merged elements that cannot be monopolized under copyright—is said to hold a “thin copyright” on the work. Thin doesn’t mean non-existent; however, it does mean that an alleged infringer will have to have taken a good chunk of the work in order to have copied enough elements to lead to an actionable case of infringement.
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Chapter 2. Originality and Creativity 62 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Effort does not matter to copyright. Training does not matter. Sweat and tears do not matter. You can work hard for weeks over a work or take a snap shop in a matter of seconds. All that matters is did you conceive of something new, original to you, and did you then create it. Much of this returns us to the public policy behind copyright, and what it protects and prevents. Copyright serves the public interest by encouraging and protecting the creation of any new work in any media. But all it protects the work from is unauthorized copying. Copyright is a monopoly, but it is a monopoly over the right to duplicate a single work. Copyright does not guaranty commercial success or even suggest financial gain or salability of the protected work. Copyright status does not speak to a work’s value or quality.
- The answer eventually came when courts gained a better understanding of the role and action of the photographer. Photographers create photos in every sense of the word. Whatever expression a photograph possesses is present because the photographer (the artist) put it there. The process of photography usually is not as time-consuming as painting or drawing, and in contemporary times, the entry-level skills required to get good results from photography are less than those required for getting good results from painting, drawing, and other visual arts. Many amateurs are happy to practice photography without any training or study. But the photographer creates the work nonetheless by processes of conception, composition, framing, cropping, controlling light levels, color, balance, saturation, focus, rendition, and many other active and creative processes. The necessary recognition for copyright is that the photograph is not naturally occurring, and it requires the intervention of an artist
- The question of worth mattered because, at the time, copyright was stingy as to its protection of visual art works—only certain, truly expressive works of art would be protected under copyright—and Justice Holmes had to determine if this circus poster was creative and artistic enough to be covered by copyright law. Based on the recommendation made in the quoted portion above, Homes held that the chromolithographic poster was copyrightable. United States law has stayed on this course since 1903—an author can receive a copyright on any expressive creation no matter how crude, humble, or pedestrian it may seem to others. But it has to be original and created by you.
- As discussed above, the public policy of copyright is to benefit the public first and foremost, not to reward authors for good works. The low bar to copyright protection benefits the general public by encouraging the production of new works. With only four bottom-line requirements for copyright—Original-Expression-Created by the Author-Fixed in a Tangible Medium—no one should be deterred from creating new works and seeking to protect them from copying.
- You could receive a new copyright for every one of the photocopied images because each is new, original to the author (the operator of the photocopy machine), and each reveals a new conception from the mind of the author that was rendered into a tangible expression in the new images produced. Note that this example assumes you had a right to make copies of all or large portions of the original image; if you didn’t have the right to copy by license, permission, public domain status, or fair use, then your efforts to enjoy a new copyright would potentially be thwarted by the enforcement of the original artist’s copyright.
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Chapter 10. Steps of a Copyright Dispute 50 results (showing 5 best matches)
- of the copyright with the Register of Copyrights in the Library of Congress occurs. This step is required before a lawsuit can be filed. As discussed in Chapter 1, copyright suits can only be brought in federal court, and federal courts require the copyright to be registered.
- All of these tests—originality, idea-expression, merger, scènes à faire, and useful articles—are a stress on the owner’s copyright that might turn a properly thick copyright, with a broad scope of protection against duplicates and unauthorized derivative works, into a thin copyright. A
- Copyright litigation follows a distinctive path through the points of analysis laid out in the chapters above. This chapter will discuss the steps of a copyright dispute in order to review the issues and considerations of copyright that we have analyzed throughout this book, and it will show how they fit into the context of an actual dispute. The insights revealed here will be useful to lawyers and law students in forming strategies for each stage of the dispute. For all readers, this section will reinforce the rules and concepts we have been examining above, and add to these some additional material that factors into the evaluation of whether the facts and circumstances of a dispute over similar works will sustain a copyright claim for infringement.
- At this point in the process, the two parties to the dispute shall be called the copyright owner and the copyist. To be fair, we should call the first party the alleged copyright owner and the second party the alleged copyist. The owner may wind up in the analysis holding an empty bag instead of a copyright; the doctrines of originality, idea-expression, merger, scènes à faire, and useful articles (functionality) may strip the so-called work down to a nub of uncopyrightable nothingness. And the copyist is only thought to be a copyist at the initial stage. Later, after we establish that this party is a true copyist, we might assign other terms to this party—infringer, defendant, or fair user.
- Step three is necessary because the time to confirm or reconfirm that you or your client possesses a valid and viable copyright is before you make a demand or file a lawsuit. A viable copyright has protectable elements that allegedly have been copied. Throughout the book, I have pointed out the factors and doctrines that can rebut the notion that you or your client actually holds a valid, enforceable copyright with protectable elements that may have been copied, namely the expression and fixation requirements (Chapter 1), the originality and creativity requirements (Chapter 2), the idea-expression distinction (Chapter 3), the scènes à faire and merger doctrines (Chapter 4), and the useful articles doctrine (Chapter 5).
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Chapter 5. Utilitarian and Functional Works 27 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The useful articles doctrine in copyright law seeks to preserve competition and progress in the production of utilitarian and functional works. By keeping useful, functional works out of copyright protection, the doctrine allows competitors in industry to make useful articles without the fear that the first competitor to design a product will have the right to exclude all others who want to make the same product. Where form follows or leads to function, copyright could tie up a certain form for a term of life plus 70 years. That is a long time for a monopoly on a useful object.
- The most important principle to learn regarding copyright’s “useful articles” law and policy is that copyright law does not protect innovation and invention of utilitarian items. Patent law is the area of intellectual property law that protects innovation and invention, but the term is far more limited (20 years) than copyright, and the requirements are high. In patent law, you must have a true invention, not anticipated by other works, and not something easily and readily anticipated by others skilled in the art and science of the invention. In copyright, works are supposed to be ornamental and expressive, not useful. If a form has both expressive characteristics and function, the functional aspects will be excluded from the protection of copyright so that these aspects will not be tied up in a copyright monopoly for the life of the creator plus 70 years.
- The design and functioning of useful articles are excluded from copyright protection. The “utilitarian and functional works” doctrine—also known as the “useful articles” doctrine—is designed to prevent the long term protections of copyright law from attaching to useful articles and creations that have function and utility, as opposed to purely ornamental works or purely expressive works such as literature, music, and the like. The public policy of intellectual property protection in the United States supports the public good first and foremost, and items with utility (clothing, tools, vehicles, appliances) benefit the public when they are made available in large numbers with diverse designs and different price-points. An open and robust level of market competition requires a certain freedom of duplication, replication, emulation, and incremental innovation that is not permissible with copyrighted works under copyright law’s derivative works protection.
- Successful dress designers and dress makers may wish to protect the style, cut, or other distinctive features that tell buyers that this dress is the maker’s dress. But that is a good strategy for trademark law, not copyright. Trademark protects such stylistic adornments if they are used as markers of goods in commerce to distinguish the source of the goods from other manufacturers. Dolce Gabbana’s buckles and Chanel’s necklines and arrangement of buttons most likely could claim this kind of protection. To the extent that the adornments are expressive and completely non-functional, they are candidates for copyright protection much like the fabric decoration discussed above. But the functional parts of the buckle or buttons will not be protected under copyright.
- case. Both Plaintiff Home Legend and Defendant Mannington Mills sell laminated flooring products. Mannington claimed it owned a copyright for its “Glazed Maple” design, but Home Legend, maker of a similar “Distressed Maple Mendocino” design, argued that Mannington’s copyright was invalid because Mannington could not obtain copyright protection for a useful article (among other claims). Mannington argued in turn that the décor paper layer of the flooring product was “for all intents and purposes, like putting a painting on the floor,” and was therefore copyrightable as a work of art. The trial court held that even though Mannington had obtained a copyright for the 2-D artwork, the 2-D artwork element of the laminate flooring was not separable from the utilitarian aspect of the flooring because the laminate flooring was not marketable if its functional elements were separated from the artistic elements, and conversely, the 2-D artwork would not be marketable if separated from the...
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Chapter 6. Copyright Term and the Public Domain 19 results (showing 5 best matches)
- If you want a new copyright on a work that used to be public domain or which contains public domain material, you have to follow copyright’s requirements and do something to the work that makes it original to you that is conceived of and created by you. And for public domain content, the change has to be substantial and material. You cannot just put a new cover on it or change the title. Copyright wants a new work with new expression. Note, too, that the copyright you obtain only runs forward on the creative, original part or arrangement that you added. The public domain content that you did not alter in a substantial material way remains public domain material.
- Copyright is intended to have a limited term. The Founding Fathers wrote a requirement into the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, to provide that copyright is intended:
- Therefore, copyright monopolies are supposed to have a limited time frame. But Congress sets the terms, and Congress can be lobbied. And across the two centuries of its existence, Congress periodically changed the terms, usually to extend the term of protection, or provide for successive, renewal terms. The latest, greatest term extension was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, in which the major studios and entertainment giants, led by Disney, rallied around the deceased pop singer and congressman, Sonny Bono, of Sonny and Cher fame, and managed to get Congress to extend corporate-owned copyright terms to keep
- Copyright terms of protection are not exceedingly complicated, but there are a lot of categories to keep track of, and, as mentioned above, Congress has a habit of prolonging the terms, so take a grain of salt with you as you study this chart of copyright terms:
- Works in the public domain are free for the taking. You can copy them or reprint and republish them. You can build on them, change them, do what you want with them. All is permitted. Note that if you reproduce or republish public domain works, you will not get a new copyright on the works. If you add to them, you will only get a copyright on that which you added.
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Chapter 3. Ideas vs. Expressions 24 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The lessons of originality and creativity lead directly to the next major topic of copyright law, ideas vs. expressions: are not protected by copyright. of ideas are. This simple statement leads to one of the most troublesome areas of copyright law: the . Authors, artists, lawyers, and judges must learn to differentiate the idea from the expression of the idea in a work, because one who copies the former is a valued contributor to the arts or literature, but one who copies the latter is a potential infringer of another person’s copyrighted work. The huge problem with this scenario is that we cannot encounter ideas outside of our own head separate from their embodiment in a communicative media, such as speech, writing, visual imagery, audio, or audio-visual recording. Somehow, an author or artist who wants to express an idea encountered in other persons’ works must discern the common “idea” and express or depict the idea without infringing the other works’ expression. This chapter...
- Not yet. First of all, nothing from the meeting of the two authors was written down, nothing was in a tangible medium. The two were only talking. Second, you cannot copyright a theme—the idea—for a game show. That is an idea, and as such, it is not copyrightable. Third, even if there was more to the scenario, the two shows do not sound very similar. So, no copyright issue yet.
- The author who communicates truly inventive, innovative, and clever ideas surely deserves protection from copying in our intellectual property legal scheme. The question is, does copyright provide that protection, and the answer is “No.” Patent law can provide intellectual property protection for truly inventive ideas, but it has strict requirements for true inventions that were not obvious to persons skilled in the prior art, But the concepts of “creative” and “creativity” in copyright law do not mean inventive or novel. And copyright’s term lasts a whole lot longer than patent law’s term—the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. That is one reason why no idea, no process, no procedure, no formula or recipe with practical application, can be tied up under copyright protection. An idea, no matter how inventive, novel, and artistically innovative, is not copyrightable and cannot be protected through copyright law.
- You cannot copyright the facts from a realistic account of historical events because the information is facts. Facts are uncopyrightable because they are not created and not original. They are discovered or communicated, but not “authored.” There is no copyright for facts or events or even research (meaning the raw data, the things you discover). The author can copyright the expression of the facts in the account. The expression is the exact wording chosen by the author to express the facts. This wording is protected, although the protection most likely will be limited to the exact wording of the author because of the merger doctrine (discussed in Chapter 4).
- Scenario 3 presents a genuine copyright infringement issue. Author One has gone far beyond the idea stage to express the ideas of the show in fixed and tangible expressions that are original to and created by Author One. Author Two obviously had access to the expressions regarding the show—Author One showed them to him. Author Two has copied a large number of the expressions of the aspects of the show—visuals, written rules, terminology—much of which is the creative, original work product of Author One. (We can tell that much of it is creative, original work product, because there is nothing inherent about human competitions that they have to take place on islands, with teams called tribes, under the watch of Tiki gods, to win talismans and immunities). Author Two most likely has infringed Author One’s copyright.
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Chapter 7. Derivative Works 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The law is clear that you don’t get a new copyright (and a new copyright term) over the preexisting copyrighted work you own and control when you adapt it and reuse it for a new creation. Only the newly added original and creative material gets a new copyright running from the new creation date. Thus, if an author prepares a new edition of an existing text, she only gets a new copyright on the newly added, edited, or updated material. The other material still in the book from the first edition retains the same copyright and term from the original edition.
- Copyright precludes the unauthorized copying of original creations whose expressions are fixed in a tangible media, but that is not all it precludes. Copyright also precludes others from adapting the content of an original work for their own purposes. The derivative works right gives copyright owners the right to preclude exact, direct, and verbatim copies of their work, and also adaptations, translations, and extensions of the work in new works or new media.
- As a review of your understanding of the workings of the derivative works doctrine, evaluate the following pair of works. Try to determine if the image on the right appears to be an unauthorized derivative work of the image on the left that might infringe the copyright of the image on the left.
- Thus, the copyright holder controls the original and those works that can be made that incorporate the original work’s expressive, communicative potential (subject, of course, to originality, idea-expression, merger, and scènes à faire limitations). Basically, any subsequent work that incorporates part of the expression of the original work such that this expression shines through in the new work can qualify as a derivative work. And the original copyright owner can authorize or preclude the creation of such works.
- Copyright, Originality, and the End of the Scènes à Faire and Merger Doctrines for Visual Works
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Table of Contents 23 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Publication Date: May 2nd, 2022
- ISBN: 9781636593401
- Subject: Intellectual Property
- Series: Short & Happy Guides
- Type: Overviews
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Description:
The Short and Happy Guide to Copyright is a succinct, enjoyable, and time-friendly text that is designed for you:
- To get up to speed on the biggest issues of copyright law, and the black letter law addressing those issues;
- To educate yourself as to your future clients’ rights, potential liabilities, and options and opportunities regarding legal problems in copyright. Whether you plan to specialize in copyright or intellectual property, or simply want to be available to your firm or law office as an attorney who can take on a novel problem in an exciting and potentially high-profile and high-dollar-value area of your firm’s or office’s practice, this book will be useful to you;
- To provide a vocabulary of legal terms to use when consulting with lawyers, clients, accountants, financial planners, and insurers regarding copyright problems in the creative, entertainment, and scientific fields;
- To identify existing or potential legal problems in your clients’ and your organization’s practices. This guide will discuss a variety of areas in which exposure to legal liability or sanctions may present itself as a current or future problem based on your clients’ practices and procedures.
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