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General
(Please forgive the lack of credits for most of these jokes. If you know the author please email me.) Why Chicken crossed
Age of Reason
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Ten Myths About Copyright Law(4/28/95) 1. "If it doesn't have a copyright notice, it's not copyrighted." This was true in the past, but today almost all major nations follow the Berne copyright convention. For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not. The default you should assume for other people's works is that they are copyrighted and may not be copied unless you *know* otherwise. There are some old works that lost protection without notice, but frankly you should not risk it unless you know forsure. It is true that a notice strengthens the protection, by warning people, and by allowing one to get more and different damages, but it is not necessary. If it looks copyrighted, you should assume it is. This applies to pictures, too. You may not scan pictures from magazines and post them to the net, and if you come upon something unknown, you shouldn't post that either. The correct form for a notice is: "Copyright <dates> by <author/owner>" You can use C in a circle instead of "Copyright" but "(C)" has never been given legal force. The phrase "All Rights Reserved" used to be required in some nations but is now not needed. 2. "If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation." False. Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in court, but that's essentially the only difference. It's still a violation if you give it away -- and there can still be heavy damages if you hurt the commercial value of the property. 3. "If it's posted to Usenet it's in the public domain." False. Nothing is in the public domain anymore unless the owner explicitly puts it in the public domain(*). Explicitly, as in you have a note from the author/owner saying, "I grant this to the public domain." Those exact words or words very much like them. Some argue that posting to Usenet implicitly grants permission to everybody to copy the posting within fairly wide bounds, and others feel that Usenet is an automatic store and forward network where all the thousands of copies made are done at the command (rather than the consent) of the poster. This is a matter of some debate, but even if the former is true (and in this writer's opinion we should all pray it isn't true) it simply would suggest posters are implicitly granting permissions "for the sort of copying one might expect when one posts to Usenet" and in no case is this a placement of material into the public domain. Furthermore it is very difficult for an implicit license to supersede an explicitly stated license that the copier was aware of. Note that all this assumes the poster had the right to post the item in the first place. If the poster didn't, then all the copies are pirate, and no implied license or theoretical reduction of the copyright can take place. (*) Copyrights can expire after a long time, putting something into the public domain, and there are some fine points on this issue regarding older copyright law versions. However, none of this applies to an original article posted to USENET. Note that granting something to the public domain is a complete abandonment of all rights. You can't make something "PD for non-commercial use." If your work is PD, other people can even modify one byte and put their name on it. 4. "My posting was just fair use!" See other notes on fair use for a detailed answer, but bear the following in mind: The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created
to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research
and education about copyrighted works without the permission of
the author. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work
are important considerations. Are you reproducing an article from
the New York Times because you needed to in order to criticize the
quality of the New York Times, or because you couldn't find time
to write your own story, or didn't want your readers to have to
pay to log onto the online services with the story or buy a copy
of the paper? The former is probably fair use, the latter probably
aren't. 5. "If you don't defend your copyright you lose it." False. Copyright is effectively never lost these days, unless explicitly given away. You may be thinking of trade marks, which can be weakened or lost if not defended. 6. "Somebody has that name copyrighted!" You can't "copyright a name," or anything short like that. Titles usually don't qualify -- but I doubt you may write a song entitled "Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey." (J.Lennon/P.McCartney) You can't copyright words, but you can trademark them, generally
by using them to refer to your brand of a generic type of product
or service. Like an "Apple" computer. Apple Computer "owns"
that word applied to computers, even though it is also an ordinary
word. Apple Records owns it when applied to music. Neither owns
the word on its own, only in context, and owning a mark doesn't
mean complete control -- see a more detailed You can't use somebody else's trademark in a way that would unfairly hurt the value of the mark, or in a way that might make people confuse you with the real owner of the mark, or which might allow you to profit from the mark's good name. For example, if I were giving advice on music videos, I would be very wary of trying to label my works with a name like "mtv." :-) 7. "They can't get me, defendants in court have powerful rights!" Copyright law is mostly civil law. If you violate copyright you would usually get sued, not charged with a crime. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a principle of criminal law, as is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." Sorry, but in copyright suits, these don't apply the same way or at all. It's mostly which side and set of evidence the judge or jury accepts or believes more, though the rules vary based on the type of infringement. In civil cases you can even be made to testify against your own interests. 8. "Oh, so copyright violation isn't a crime or anything?" Actually, recently in the USA commercial copyright violation involving more than 10 copies and value over $2500 was made a felony. So watch out. (At least you get the protections of criminal law.) On the other hand, don't think you're going to get people thrown in jail for posting your E-mail. The courts have much better things to do than that. This is a fairly new, untested statute. 9. "It doesn't hurt anybody -- in fact it's free advertising." It's up to the owner to decide if they want the free ads or not. If they want them, they will be sure to contact you. Don't rationalize whether it hurts the owner or not, *ask* them. Usually that's not too hard to do. Time past, ClariNet published the very funny Dave Barry column to a large and appreciative Usenet audience for a fee, but some person didn't ask, and forwarded it to a mailing list, got caught, and the newspaper chain that employs Dave Barry pulled the column from the net, pissing off everybody who enjoyed it. Even if you can't think of how the author or owner gets hurt, think about the fact that piracy on the net hurts everybody who wants a chance to use this wonderful new technology to do more than read other people's flamewars. 10. "They e-mailed me a copy, so I can post it." To have a copy is not to have the copyright. All the E-mail
you write is copyrighted. However, E-mail is not, unless previously
agreed, secret. So you can certainly *report* on what E-mail you
are sent, and reveal what it says. You can even quote parts of it
to demonstrate. Frankly, somebody who sues over an ordinary message
might well get no damages, because the message has no commercial
value, but if you want to stay strictly in the ----------------- In Summary --------------------------- These days, almost all things are copyrighted the moment they
are written, and no copyright notice is required. It should be noted that the author, as publisher of an electronic newspaper on the net, makes his living by publishing copyrighted material in electronic form and has the associated biases. However, DO NOT E-MAIL HIM FOR LEGAL ADVICE; for that use other resources or consult a lawyer. Also note that while most of these principles are universal in Berne copyright signatory nations, some are derived from Canadian and U.S. law. This document is provided to clear up some common misconceptions about intellectual property law that are often seen on the net. It is not intended to be a complete treatise on all the nuances of the subject. A more detailed copyright FAQ, covering other issues including compilation copyright and more intricacies of fair use is available in the same places you found this note, or for FTP on rtfm.mit.edu in pub/usenet-by-group/comp.answers/law/Copyright-FAQ. Also consider gopher://marvel.loc.gov/11/copyright for actual statutes. Another useful document is http://www.eff.org/pub/CAF/law/ip-primer This FAQ can be found at http://www.clari.net/brad/copymyths.html From: brad@clari.net (Brad Templeton) |
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