...a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression. In copyright law, there are a lot of different types of works, including paintings, photographs, illustrations, musical compositions, sound recordings, computer programs, books, poems, blog posts, movies, architectural works, plays, and so much more!

Anyone who creates a fixed expression of an idea (said idea has to have a modicum of 'originality')  is automatically a copyright owner. Copyright itself is actually a temporary 'bundle' of rights. Creators / authors can license out some of those copyrights (for money, or other times, for free), or even 'assign' (permanently sell) their rights to someone else. If the company someone works for is 'work for hire', then the company will legally own the copyrights to anything produced by the employee at their job. Even after people die, their copyrights can be passed down to someone else via their will or a bequest.

U.S. copyright law provides copyright owners with the following exclusive rights:

• Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords.
• Prepare derivative works based upon the work.
• Distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership or by rental, lease, or lending.
• Perform the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
• Display the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work. This right also applies to the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
• Perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission if the work is a sound recording.

Copyright also provides the owner of copyright the right to authorize others to exercise these exclusive rights, subject to certain statutory limitations.

What is Copyright? | U.S. Copyright Office. (n.d.). Retrieved December 7, 2023, from https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/

What the above is really saying, is that copyright owners can do all of those things (make copies, display, sell, perform, etc...and charge money while doing so), to make revenue from their intellectual property.

How long does copyright protection last?

The length of copyright protection depends on when a work was created. Under the current law, works created on or after January 1, 1978, have a copyright term of life of the author plus seventy years after the author’s death. If the work is a joint work, the term lasts for seventy years after the last surviving author’s death. For works made for hire and anonymous or pseudonymous works, copyright protection is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter. Works created before 1978 have a different timeframe.

What is Copyright? | U.S. Copyright Office. (n.d.). Retrieved December 7, 2023, from https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/

• If someone permits you to make use of their copyrighted work via a license (whether regular or open license), to legally use that work means to obey the terms of that license. Don't do what it does not give you explicit permission to do.
• Due to one of the 'moral rights' of authors (here, the right to be known as the person who created that work), when using an author's work one must acknowledge them as the creator:
  • During Fair Use, for example, one need not ask permission when using a little of someone's work (under the fair use doctrine), but in order to use that work ethically, must cite it correctly.
  • Similarly, when using openly-licensed materials, one must attribute it correctly.
    • To be clear: correct attribution is a legal requirement (one of the license's terms) when using materials openly-licensed with creative commons licenses.
• Are you faculty and want to put something on Reserve in the Whittemore Library for your students?  See our Reserves Policy page for information on how we will assist you in complying with Copyright law when you are putting items on reserve.

Copyright law gives copyright owners the exclusive right to (among other rights) make money from their intellectual property, but did you know that there are also limits that were deliberately built-in to copyright law, that are available even before copyrighted material goes into the public domain?

Fair Use

Fair use allows the public to use small amounts of the copyrighted works of others - without having to ask, get a license, or pay any fee. This allows learning and scholarship to happen - allowing us to quote from copyrighted works, make a copy of a certain amount of a work for our own use, and to be inspired by others' works. In other words...if the Fair Use exception didn't exist...education, especially higher education as we know it... probably wouldn't exist.

But remember - when using someone's work via the Fair Use Doctrine, you must always cite your source properly!

One oddity of Fair Use, though, is that there is no one specific rule about how much of a person's copyrighted work you can use...without getting in trouble for infringing on someone else's copyright.  Instead, the following four factors are looked at to decide if the use of another's work was indeed 'fair use':

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; AND
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Concerned that the four factors as listed above look too vague to be very helpful in figuring out whether what you want to use of someone else's work will be judged as fair use?  This downloadable PDF 'Fair Use Checklist' from Columbia University should help.

In general, the following kinds of uses are most likely to be labeled as fair use:  criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, and research - as long as you don't go overboard in how much you use.

For example: if you were to copy all of someone's scholarly book and give a copy to each of your students, you would definitely be infringing on the right of the author to receive revenue from sales of their book. But if you only copied and distributed a short excerpt, that would be far more likely to be considered appropriate fair use.

Other Exceptions

We won't go into great detail here, but there are exceptions that are specifically available to libraries, museums, and archives, that make it possible for these institutions to better carry out their mandates to make available, preserve or migrate certain works. An example would be to migrate a work to a different format in order to make it more accessible to patrons (such as converting a print book to an audio-book or to a braille version for those who cannot see). Or if a work is falling apart, there's an exception that will allow an institution to make a copy so that the item will not be lost forever. Libraries being able to allow patrons to make photocopies of small amounts of copyrighted works for their own personal use is another common library-related exception.

Search (U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use) Cases

The ultimate collection of Fair Use court cases (from all the circuit courts all the way up to the Supreme Court)!  Note the case details and judges' decisions to get a sense of copyright law trends in the United States over time.

Corporate Kaijus Clash: 15 Famous Copyright Infringement Cases

Entertaining list of civil court cases from the blog of IP Law Firm Abou Naja

Famous Music Copyright Cases Revisited: Ed Sheeran, Led Zeppelin, Katy Perry and More

Landmark music industry copyright infringement cases from Variety

5 famous copyright infringement cases (and what you can learn)

Descriptions of copyright infringement court cases more focused on visual art, from Vista's '99 designs' website