Guide to Copyright Law
A copyright protects a creator's rights with respect to literary and other creative works. Copyright law is fairly standardized worldwide, and international protection is available. Nevertheless, the law changes from time to time, and it is important to keep abreast of these changes whether you are a creator of a work or wish to use all or part of a work that someone else has created.
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What Copyrights Protect
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Copyrights protect creative works that are generally considered to be of an artistic rather than scientific nature. Patents protect scientific inventions. However, computer programs are protected under copyright rather than patent law. Examples of other types of works that are entitled to copyright protection include literature, music, paintings, photographs, films, sculptures and architectural designs. To be copyrighted, the work must be reduced to a tangible medium--a story told orally and not recorded, for example, is not entitled to copyright protection.
Obtaining a Copyright
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Under U.S. law, a copyright attaches automatically as soon as a copyrightable work is reduced to a tangible form. The laws of many other countries require registration before a copyright is issued. Even in the U.S., it could be difficult to prove that you are the original creator of a particular work unless you register that work with the U.S. Copyright and Trademark Office.
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The "First Sale" Doctrine
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The "first sale" doctrine is one of three major loopholes in copyright law. This doctrine holds that copyright protection applies only to the first sale of a particular copy of a copyrighted work. For instance, when you purchase a music CD, part of the price represents the royalties that the CD shop pays to the copyright holder. If you open a used CD shop, however, you will not have to pay royalties on the CDs you sell as long as the work was sold to you before you sold it to your customer. By contrast, if you download a copyrighted song from the Internet, you will owe royalties to the copyright holder because downloading is a form of copying, which creates a new copy that has not been sold before.
The "Fair Use" Doctrine
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The "fair use" doctrine allows you to use a small portion of a copyrighted work without paying royalties as long as you give proper attribution to the creator. This is a gray area of the law. No exact guidelines exist on what constitutes "fair use"--it is determined by courts on a case-by-case basis involving several factors, including the length of the material used in comparison with the total length of the work. In general, it is considered permissible to use one line of a copyrighted song in printed material or one paragraph of a copyrighted novel without paying royalties.
The "Work for Hire" Doctrine
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The "work for hire" doctrine allows the creator of a copyrightable work to relinquish the copyright voluntarily to someone who hired him or her to create the work. An example is a reporter who writes articles for a newspaper in exchange for a monthly salary.
Obtaining Worldwide Copyright Protecton
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The U.S. and most other nations adhere to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. This allows the creator of a copyrighted work in the U.S. (whether or not a U.S. citizen) to obtain copyright protection in all Berne Convention countries without having to register the copyright in those countries.
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