The three basic areas of intellectual property law include copyrights, patents, and trademarks. This post focuses on the general nature of copyright, as well as access to copyright law-related resources.
Copyright law protects certain expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Lee Wilson, The Pocket Legal Companion to Copyright, at 11 (2012). To receive legal protection, a work must be original, include some “expression” of the creator, and be “fixed” in a tangible medium. Id. at 13. In addition, copyright protection attaches for a certain period, which is generally seventy years from the death of the work’s creator. Id. at 11, 42.
The federal copyright statute is located within chapters 1 through 8 and 10 through 12 of title 17 of the United States Code. Copyright Law of the United States | U.S. Copyright Office. In addition, multiple examples of copyrightable and non-copyrightable content are listed here.
Information on navigating federal copyright law is available on the Internet, including the following resources:
Columbia University Libraries Copyright Quick Guide
Stanford University Libraries Copyright & Fair Use Cases
Association of Research Libraries History of Copyright in the United States
Weintraub Tobin The IP Law Blog
Wolters Kluwer Kluwer Copyright Blog
Quick Facts About Copyright Law in the United States
- Absent some exception such as “fair use,” others cannot legally copy, make “derivative” works from, distribute, perform, or display your original work without your permission;
- Your original work is protected by copyright law even if you have not registered it; and,
- When a copyright on a work expires, the work enters the public domain.
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