What is copyright?

• Copyright is protection provided by law to authors (or publishers) of original literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, and certain other intellectual works.
• Copyrighted applies to unpublished works as well as published works – just because something is not published does not mean that it can’t be copyrighted.
• Copyright owners generally have the exclusive right (with some exceptions such as “fair use” in educational settings) to reproduce the work, to sell or lease the work, to perform or display the work publicly, and to authorize others to do any of these things. 
• Essentially, what copyright does is make sure that creative works are treated as “property,” just like land or stock in a company. By granting authors (or publishers) exclusive “rights” to sell, lease, perform, and display their intellectual creations, copyright law guarantees that authors are the only ones allowed to profit from their work. Within the ideology of free market capitalism, this right provides authors with the incentive to create. If they did not have the profit incentive, the argument goes, they would be much less likely to write, paint, sculpt, record music, etc. 

How does copyright work?

• An author’s copyright exists from the moment the work is created in fixed form. If you go home today and write a short story or paint a picture, as soon as the story or the painting is finished, you own the copyright. This is true whether or not you ever register your copyright. This is also true whether or not you are a U.S. citizen or whether you created the work in the United States or abroad. 
• However, If your work is published, in order to receive copyright protection, you must either be a citizen or resident of the U.S. or a country which has signed a treaty with the U.S. with regard to copyright; or your work must have been published in the U.S. or a country which has signed a treaty with the U.S. with regard to copyright. 
• Copyright protection for works created after 1977 lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. 

What is protected by copyright?

• Copyrightable works include literary works; musical works including any accompanying words; dramatic works including any accompanying music; pantomimes and choreographic works; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works. 
• The above categories should be viewed broadly. For example, computer programs and most “compilations” may be registered as literary works; maps and architectural plans may be registered as pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works. 

What is not protected by copyright?

• Works that have not been fixed in a tangible form, for example choreographic works that have not been notated or recorded or improvisational speeches or performances that have not been written or recorded. 
• Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs (e.g. a stop sign); variations of typographic ornamentation; listings of ingredients or contents. 
• Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration. 
• Works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship, for example calendars, height and weight charts, measurements, etc.

Along these lines, we can see that a cookbook could be copyrighted, because it is a unique compilation, but the recipes in it could not, as they consist of lists of ingredients and procedures. 
 

How is copyright enforced?

• Copyright is not policed by the government — it is up to the copyright holder to defend him or herself from infringement. This is typically done by filing a lawsuit against whomever you think is violating your copyright. 
• While publication and registration are not necessary to secure copyright protection for a work, the main advantage to registration and including a notice of copyright on your work (for example       © 2000 John Doe) is that registration is required in order to take to court a lawsuit against someone who has infringed your copyright.
• Registration entails filling out a form and sending a $30 fee plus a copy of your work to the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

The Internet offers an unprecedented opportunity for people to (illegally) share copyrighted “intellectual property.” With the Internet, copyright holders face the same issues in defending their copyrights that they do with photocopiers, tape recorders, VCR’s, and CD burners, but on a much larger scale. There is a difference in magnitude between copying a CD for a friend and posting an MP3 on the Web for anyone to download. 

With a growing amount of information (text, music, video) in digitized form, we are already seeing a shift from the concept of “ownership” to the concept of “access.” Copyright holders (publishers, record companies, etc.) are experimenting with charging information users “per-use” or for a specific time period instead of for indefinite rights to the information.

For example, instead of a buying a CD, in the future you might pay each time you listen to a particular song. Think “pay-per-view” movies applied to music. In libraries, this is already happening: instead of a library buying a book or database in printed or electronic form and sharing it with library users for years to come, libraries are paying annual subscriptions to access specific information. If they stop paying, all access to the information, even the older information, is lost. Will this ultimately limit access to information? Will it increase the gap between “information have’s and have-not’s”? 

If it is indeed true that copyright once performed the function of increasing the output of creative works by ensuring the author exclusive rights to profit from the work, is this still the case? Given the huge amount of their own creative work and useful information that individuals make available for free on the Internet (for example freeware, MP3’s that haven’t been released by a record company, creative and scholarly writing), are copyright laws really necessary after all to provide an incentive for people to create and share their work? Do copyright laws, especially revisions of the copyright laws that apply to digital information, limit the sharing of information to the point of stifling creativity? Does the very concept of “intellectual property” and the limits on access to information that it implies now hold back the further development of human society?