Copyright

12 Key excerpts on "Copyright"

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  Permissions, A Survival Guide

  Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property

  • Susan M. Bielstein(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  intellectual property law is dominated by the concept of Copyright. What is Copyright exactly, and who invented it? Copyright is the exclusive, legal right to publish, reproduce, and sell a literary, artistic, dramatic, or musical work. It is designed pri-marily to protect an author or artist q against any unauthorized copy-ing of her works r for a reasonable period of time . A Copyright can be broken down into a cluster of subrights, each of which can be sold or retained at the owner’s discretion. For ex-ample, a writer or her agent may license one publisher to issue her book in English and another one to publish it in French. A sculptor may allow an art historian to reproduce one of his pieces in a book or a film director to use it in a movie. Copyright does not cover ideas, only their expression. And the ex-pression must be fixed in a tangible medium. y For example, just be-cause Salvador Dalí dreamed of melting clocks one night, doesn’t 4 * W hat Is Copyright? 1. Because this book is geared toward the visual arts, I frequently refer to the author as “the artist.” 2. Consciously or unconsciously, Copyright laws are always tailored to the most up-to-date technologies of mass reproduction; thus, the earliest laws were geared toward books and writing. When new inventions made it feasible to copy pictorial, musical, and graphic works, the law naturally expanded to encompass those media. And today, in the early twenty-first century, we must take into account computer programs, digital technologies, and other kinds of new media too. 3. Thus, skywriting, which is ephemeral, cannot be Copyrighted. 13 W hat Is Copyright? mean he holds a monopoly on the idea.

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  Intellectual Property Overlaps

  Theory, Strategies, and Solutions

  • Robert Tomkowicz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4    Copyright law

  The Copyright Act is usually presented as a balance between promoting the public interest in the encouragement and dissemination of works of the arts and intellect and obtaining a just reward for the creator.

  (Justice William Binnie, Supreme Court of Canada521 )

  [I]n order to protect the essential balance which lies at the heart of Copyright law, care must be taken to ensure that Copyright protection is not allowed to extend beyond the legitimate interests of a Copyright holder.

  (Justice Michel Bastarache, Supreme Court of Canada522 )

  Copyright law is the segment of the intellectual property system most predisposed to overlaps with other segments. Two factors lead to this conclusion. First, unlike most of the other intellectual property rights, Copyrights arise automatically without any formalities once a Copyrightable work is created and fixed in a tangible medium. Consequently, when a new technology with hybrid characteristics or new means for expressing traditional subject matter is developed, it may automatically fall under the protection of Copyright law in addition to other intellectual property rights, whether or not its owner is interested in acquiring this protection. Copyright also has a longer duration than most other intellectual property rights, which encourages subsequent use of overlapping Copyrights when the other intellectual property monopoly expires. And second, since the inclusion of computer programs in the definition of literary works in Copyright law, this segment of the intellectual property system has expanded its protective umbrella into many forms of technology. This evolution is ongoing and slowly turns Copyrights into a scheme that controls access to many technologically advanced products. In this context, the purpose of Copyright law is being replaced with purposes normally associated with patent law.

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  Technology Law

  Australian and International Perspectives

  • Marcus Smith, Gregor Urbas(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Available: . 20 For information on Copyright law generally, there are numerous general texts, such as Lionel Bently et al, Intellectual Property Law (5th ed, Oxford University Press, 2018). Such texts cover the subsistence and ownership of Copyright in great detail, whereas the following discussion will focus mainly on infringement. 21 Gregor Urbas, ‘Public Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No 177 (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2000). 22 Raymond Shih Ray Ku, ‘The Creative Destruction of Copyright: Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology’ (2002) 69 University of Chicago Law Review 263. While some reforms of patent law and enforcement actions against patent trolls using anti- competition and deceptive trade practices laws have occurred, the approach of granting limited monopolies for the advancement of inventive and creative industries will seemingly always be prone to forms of market manipulation and abuse by bad actors. 18 One response has been the emergence of ‘open source’ models, particularly in the development of computer software, whereby code is released into the public domain for refinement and adaptation by others without the rigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, including both patents and Copyright. 19 Copyright and entertainment industries Copyright is the form of intellectual property that protects original literary, musical and dramatic works, as well as sound recordings and films. It does not require registration, unlike a patent, and arises as soon as the work is created in some material form (eg by being written down). This means that almost all of us are Copyright owners, although few will ever apply for a patent.

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  Information Law

  Compliance for librarians, information professionals and knowledge managers

  • Charles Oppenheim, Adrienne Muir, Naomi Korn(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Facet Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Copyright is the exclusive and assignable legal right, initially given to the author of an original work for a fixed number of years, to reproduce, print, publish, disseminate electronically, perform, or record their creative material. The word ‘initially’ is used, as the author can and often does assign the Copyright, i.e. transfer the Copyright ownership, to a third party, such as a publisher. Assignment is discussed further below. In order to use Copyright materials, you have to know what it is and the difficulties and opportunities Copyright can create. In the UK, Copyright law is primarily based on the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and subsequent revisions, including the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003, SI 2003/2498, various Copyright Rights in Performances Regulations 2014, some sections of previous Copyright Acts 1911 and 1956, various European Union (EU) Directives (most of which have been transposed into UK law by means of Statutory Instruments), international treaties that the UK has signed up to and case law from UK Courts and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). 1 The key points to note about Copyright are as follows: ◆ Copyright is an economic right granted exclusively to the creator(s) of an original work, which must be in some tangible or fixed format, to either permit or to prevent other people from copying, and doing 1. At the time this book was written, the UK was still a member of the European Union and ECJ decisions applied to it. If the UK does leave the EU, future ECJ decisions will not automatically apply in the UK, though in practice, we expect UK courts will often still follow the decisions taken by the ECJ. Copyright and related rights 1 certain other things (known as ‘restricted acts’ – see further discussion below), to it.

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  A User's Guide to Copyright

  • Michael F. Flint(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Butterworth-Heinemann

    (Publisher)

  These two quotations contain as clear exposés of the nature of Copyright as is to be found anywhere. As the word itself implies, Copyright is literally a right to prevent other people copying an original work. It should be noted that it must be an original work, not an original idea. As for the word 'work', which appears frequently throughout this book, only the types of 'work' which the Copyright Act says may have Copyright protection, are entitled to it. Not everything which could be described as being a 'work' is entitled to Copyright. Therefore this word is used in this book in the technical sense given to it by the Act — a matter treated in more detail in chapter 2. 1.04 Intellectual property and Copyright The main difficulty in comprehending Copyright seems to be the association that is made between Copyright, patents and trade marks. These diverse creatures are, for convenience, usually grouped together under the headings of 7 1.05 The nature of Copyright 'industrial property' or 'intellectual property'. It is certainly approp-riate to include design Copyright — which is registrable unlike any other form of Copyright — under these generic headings, but whilst Copyright certainly is a form of property, it is arguable that it would be preferable to group Copyright together with passing off, breach of confidence and invasion of privacy. 1.05 The Copyright statutes The law of Copyright is now entirely contained in the Copyright Act 1956 and the Copyright (Amend-ment) Act 1971. The law relating to industrial design is contained in the Registered Designs Act 1949 and the Design Copyright Act 1968. The Dramatic and Musical Performers' Protection Act 1958 and the Performers' Protection Act 1963, whilst not dealing specifically with Copyright, have given protection to performers in a way which has almost the effect of creating rights analagous to Copyright.

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  New Frontiers of Intellectual Property Law

  IP and Cultural Heritage - Geographical Indications - Enforcement - Overprotection

  • Christopher Heath, Anselm Kamperman Sanders, Christopher Heath, Anselm Kamperman Sanders(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The scope of protection of the exclusive right granted covers the reproduction of the claimed teaching, made either in an identical or an equivalent way. In practice, the patent covering the concept is disclosed independently from the way chosen to express such a teaching. b) The formal expressions are usually protected under the Copyright system. Copyright is not based on the “rewarding” approach that is usually found in the patent system. Copyright, moreover, does not protect ideas or concepts, but just the specific expression of an idea. The aim of Copyright protection is to recognise the author’s exclusive right to reproduce his creation. Consequently the scope of protection of Copyright is very narrow and cannot prevent third parties from cre-ating similar though non-identical works that might embody the same 164 Giovanni F. Casucci 12 In such a case the Court also expressed its position asserting that certain elements of interfacing human being and electronic devices (such a commands expression/text/ symbols) should constitute a publicly available technical standard. idea. 13 In practice, Copyright protection covers the expression of a work independently from the idea or the concept involved. D. The Copyright Approach to Software Protection The idea of applying the Copyright system to software was adopted in the ‘80s in Europe, through the legislation and/or the jurisprudence of the vari-ous member States 14 as an alternative method of protection due to the expressed exclusion of the patent protection (see below). In reality, the first mover in this direction was the United States who on 12 December 1980 adopted the “Computer Software Amendment Act”. In 1991 15 the European Community adopted Directive 91/250 on the protec-tion of computer programs.

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  Professional Issues in Information Technology

  • Frank Bott(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

    (Publisher)

  Intellectual property crosses national borders much more readily than tangible property and the international nature of intellectual property rights has long been recognised. The international law relating to trade marks and patents is based on the Paris Convention, which was signed in 1883. The Berne Convention, which lies at the basis of international Copyright law, was signed in 1886. 114 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS Rapid changes in technology and the commercial developments that follow them present the law with new problems. The law relating to intellectual property rights is evolving very rapidly and most of this evolution is taking place in a global or regional context. For the UK, European Community law regarding intellectual property rights is critically important, but this law is itself much influenced by developments elsewhere, particularly in the USA. Software can be very valuable, as the accounts of companies such as Oracle, IBM or Microsoft show. But software is intangible property. The industry can only therefore protect its assets by using intellectual property rights. Hence the importance of the topic for information systems engineers and hence the length of this chapter. Similar considerations apply to films, television programmes and recordings of musical performances. There are several different rights that relate to intellectual property. In this book, we shall primarily be concerned with those that are relevant to software and the information systems industry. These rights should be looked on as a package; different rights may be used to protect different aspects of a piece of software. Copyright is, as the name suggests, concerned with the right to copy something. It may be a written document, a picture or photograph, a piece of music, a recording or many other things, including a computer program. Confidential information is information that a person receives in circumstances that make it clear he or she must not pass it on.

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  Professional Issues in Software Engineering

  • Frank Bott, Allison Coleman, Allison Coleman, Diane Rowland(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Encyclopaedia of Information Technology Law , para 2.112. Intellectual property rights 153 medium, and here an analogy with the recording of the jazz improvisation might be appropriate, with the result that the unauthorized fixation would give rise to a Copyright in the creator of the work, as before. Mere ideas which are not recorded, but perhaps only remembered by persons who heard them being expressed, are not protected by Copyright. This can have important practical implications. If an idea is not embodied in a patented invention, and is not recorded for the purposes of Copyright law, the only way in which it can be protected from exploitation by others is as confidential information. But if it was not disclosed in circumstances which impose an obligation of confidence, then it will not be protected by intellec-tual property laws. 6.2.2 Who owns Copyright? The first owner of Copyright is the author of a work. The author is the person who creates a work. The term author is most appropriately used to describe the writer of a literary work, but thereafter language is stretched beyond its normal usage so that for the purposes of the 1988 Act: • the author of a sound recording is the producer; • the author of a film is the producer or principal director; • in the case of a broadcast the author is the person making the broadcast; • the author of a cable programme is the person providing the cable pro-gramme service in which the programme is included; • if the work is the typographical arrangement of a published edition, the author is the publisher. Computer-generated works and computer-aided design If a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is computer generated, the author is the “person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken” . “Computer-generated” is defined in Section 178 of the Act as a work “generated by a computer in circumstances such that there is no human author of the work” .

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  The Origin of Copyright

  Expression as Knowing in Being and Copyright Onto-Epistemology

  • Wenwei Guan(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Statute of Anne to going global between the Berne Convention and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regimes, has become both the driver and the bearer of Copyright protection when Copyright prohibits encryption technology distribution and unauthorized access. Technology, as the driving force of Copyright evolution, facilitates the onto-epistemological separation and authorship isolation through the Copyright anti-circumvention regime. The chapter calls for great caution regarding the imperative onto-epistemological balance of rights and obligations in the context of technological development and the negative consequences of Copyright technological control, should Copyright digital reform move further.

  5.1 Introduction

  Copyright, as Goldstein rightly pointed out, “was technology’s child from the start,” as it was the use of water power and the advent of printing technology, together with mass consumers’ demands replacing the preferences of a few royal, aristocratic, wealthy patrons, that called for the protection of Copyright.1 Technological advances and network infrastructure progress in recent decades have significantly facilitated and challenged Copyright development, which was evident in the birth of the 1996 Internet Treaties and their follow-up development of modern Copyright law in the digital age.2 At both national and regional levels, the USA’s Digital Milliennium Copyright Act (DMCA)3 and the European Union (EU)’s InfoSoc Directive4 represent significant efforts of Copyright reform for the digital age. EU’s newly adopted Digital Single Market Directive 2019 marks the latest Copyright modernization move for the digital age, in particular in responding to digital technology’s transformation of how “creative content is produced, distributed and accessed.”5 However, Hong Kong’s efforts in Copyright reform in response to technological advances achieved mixed results. On the one hand, after a brief public consultation, Hong Kong’s 2007 Copyright amendment successfully introduced anti-circumvention mechanism confirming technological protection of rightholders’ Copyright interests.6 On the other hand, Hong Kong’s efforts at adapting Copyright protection for the digital environment that started at around the same time, with the first public consultation in 2006,7 failed in both attempts in 2012 and 2016 for various reasons.8

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  Understanding Digital Libraries

  • Michael Lesk(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Morgan Kaufmann

    (Publisher)

  Now, the Chinese appear not only to produce pirate copies for internal consumption but are exporting to other Asian countries, including places (such as Hong Kong) where substantial progress had been made reducing local piracy. Figure 11.1 shows trends for software piracy around the world, according to the Business Software Alliance (2003). Trends for dollar value of software piracy don’t look as good, since the downward trend in percentage of piracy is outweighed by the rapidly growing size of the industry. Table 11.1 gives the estimates for the dollar value of pirate software, measured at retail price. 296 ELEVEN | INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 100 80 60 40 20 0 Percent software pirated Western Europe North America Asia/Pacific World Eastern Europe Latin America Middle East/Africa Figure 11.1 Global trends in software piracy. Table 11.1 Costs of software piracy. Software Piracy Worldwide (at retail prices) Year Value ($B) 1994 12.346 1995 13.332 1996 11.306 1997 11.440 1998 10.976 1999 12.163 2000 11.750 2001 10.975 2002 13.075 Similarly, piracy of music is widespread in many countries. Here, unlike soft-ware, the main location of illegal copying is in the developed world, with many students using personal machines for music downloading, as will be discussed in Section 11.5. Copyright is a technique to protect a form of expression. Its goal is to encour-age authors, and it is (in the United States) based in the Constitution: Art. I, 11.1 HISTORY OF Copyright LAW 297 sect. 8, lets Congress “Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by secur-ing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Copyright does not protect useful objects. In fact, if something is useful, that would be a legal argument for not granting Copyright protection. Nor does it protect ideas, as opposed to the way they are expressed.

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  Intellectual Property Law Essentials

  • Duncan Spiers(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  Copyright – PART I: WHAT IS PROTECTED 7 2 Copyright – PART I: WHAT IS PROTECTED Most students have some direct encounter with Copyright as a form of intellectual property. They know that photocopying a book is prohibited because Copyright is the legal right an individual has to prevent others from copying or reproducing their created work. They may also be aware that Copyright, like other forms of intellectual property, is mainly about protecting the owner’s economic interests. But they may not know what kinds of non-commercial acts they are permitted to do without breaching Copyright law. And they may have only a vague idea of what kinds of property fall under the jurisdiction of Copyright law as opposed to other forms of intellectual property protection. To understand Copyright, we must first understand the kinds of work that are protected. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The first English Copyright system was created in 1556 when members of the Stationers’ Company were given powers to register their printed books with the company in London. Unregistered books could be searched out and destroyed. At its inception this was a means of preventing politically and religiously dangerous works from being published, but gradually this system of registration provided publishers with a means of protecting their own registered books by preventing other persons from copying them. A form of Copyright had therefore developed. This English system did not apply to Scotland which was a wholly separate legal jurisdiction at the time and as a result it was common for books to be imported here from England and from other foreign countries and then reprinted here. The justification for the reprinting (apart from providing Scottish publishers with a source of income) was that it was considered that Scottish people should have the right to acquire knowledge and learn from reading works published in other countries.

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  Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions

  • Ruth L. Okediji(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  33 This view rests on superficial assumptions about the creative ecosystem, and therefore it may ultimately lead to inefficient outcomes. 30 Pamela Samuelson, Justifications for Copyright Limitations & Exceptions, in Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions (Ruth L. Okediji ed., 2017). 31 See, Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, 755 F.3d 87 (2d Cir. 2014) (citing Pierre N. Leval “In short, our law recognizes that Copyright is not an inevitable, divine, or natural right that confers on authors the absolute ownership of their creations. It is designed rather to stimulate activity and progress in the arts for the intellectual enrichment of the public.”). See also Jessica Litman, Readers’ Copyright, 58 J. Copyright Soc’y 325–53 (2011). 32 This approach is also consistent with the U.S. Constitutional authority: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” To promote progress in science and useful arts may require setting limits on exclusive rights that do not promote progress, such as the right to prevent the use of creative works for learning. See, e.g., L. RAY PATTERSON & STANLEY LINDBERG, The Nature of Copyright: A Law of User Rights (1991). 33 See, e.g., Jane C. Ginsburg, Putting Cars on the “Information Superhighway”: Authors, Exploiters and Copyright in Cyberspace, 95 Colum. L. Rev. 1466 (1995). Niva Elkin-Koren 144 In recent years, interest in users of Copyrighted materials has grown. The litera- ture increasingly centers on the recipients of Copyrighted works. 34 Scholars stress the significance of use of Copyrighted materials for protecting freedom of speech 35 or securing consumer sovereignty. 36 Others attempt to articulate users’ interests within the framework of Copyright law.

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