Copyright law

If you're publishing on the internet, it's important to know about copyright law & how to avoid breaking it. Copyright law is covered in Title 17 of the United States Code; follow the link to read the whole text, but it might take you a few days! But I can describe the basics, because copyright is something we run into a lot in my work at the library. For example, if it wasn't for copyright law, we could buy one copy of a book and photocopy or scan it & provide an unlimited number of copies for free. Obviously, we can't do that, but we need to know what we are allowed to do to provide the most access to our materials (books, media, online resources) that we can without breaking the law.

Things that are covered by US copyright are any work, such as a music recording, a book, or a photograph, that is fixed in a certain form, & that was produced by a US-based individual. (Other countries have their own copyright laws which can vary.) Once a novel is written, it is considered "fixed" even if it's never published. If you have an idea for a book and you verbally tell your friend and he writes a book based on that idea, he isn't breaking the law. It has to be fixed to be covered but that doesn't mean it has to be published.

So, we know what can be covered by copyright... now how do we know if the specific thing we are looking at is protected? Usually you should assume that any work is protected. That is because registering the work or putting a little "c in a circle" symbol on it isn't necessary to copyright something. Also, copyright does expire eventually and very old works are the considered to be in the public domain (meaning they can be copied by anyone, freely), but this doesn't happen for a long time... for things created since 1998, their copyright expires 70 years after their author dies. So, for most things, you can assume that the copyright is owned by someone.

Which brings an interesting question for anyone who spends any amount of time on the internet. If you go to any blog you will see that the posts are illustrated with photos & feature YouTube clips & other media. Are all of these blogs breaking copyright? Some of them are, and if they're small they might never get caught. But here is one example of a blog post on a major blog that is illustrated with a photo. We don't know where this photo came from, but Lifehacker has such a big readership it's quite possible that if they owed someone money for using that photo, word would get back to that person & they would be getting a letter from a lawyer. So the options for using the photo fairly are:

• they could have already paid the owner or gotten his written permission
• the blogger could have taken the photo himself, so he would be the copyright owner & could give himself permission
• they could have gotten the photo from a stock photo site like iStockPhoto that provides photos for a fee or for free & takes care of the payment to the artist
• they could be using the photo by claiming a Fair Use exception

Fair use? What is that? It's a big topic & so I will save it for another post.