Copyright Law, Fair Use and the Public Domain

Copyright is the protection of intellectual property. It protects against the unfair use and distribution of material. For use to be fair, you have to have permission from the copyright holder (usually the creator but the creator can sell parts of the rights they have to other companies in which case permission would have to be obtained from that particular company). There is a way to get around having to get permission to use the work. It is called fair use. What is fair use and how is it determined will be described in detail later, but now let us look into the history of copyright law so we can get a better understanding of what copyright law is.

The idea of Copyright Law goes back to England during the 1700s. In England all rights regarding people’s written works were given to the Stationer’s Company. The authors would receive money for their work but all rights to the work itself were owned by the Stationer’s Company. Then in 1710 the Parliament passed The Statute of Anne. This gave “the author of any book or books already composed, and not printed and published, or that shall hereafter be composed, and his assignee or assigns, shall have the sole liberty of printing and reprinting such book and books for the term of fourteen years, to commence from the day of the first publishing the same”. This fourteen year term of protection was renewed for another fourteen years, if after the first fourteen years the author was still alive. Copyright protection was written into the United States Constitution as well. In Article 1 Section 8 it says, “to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries”. This covers patents, copyrights and trademarks. Trademarks and patents are different from copyright though. A trademark protects the names of products and logos. A patent can protect inventions and discoveries. So then what does a copyright protect?

A copyright protects “an original work from the moment it is fixed in a tangible medium of expression from which it can be read back either directly or by electronic, mechanical or any other means”. It also gives the author or creator the right to reproduce, distribute, perform, display and create derivatives of the original work. When a copyrighted work is used in a work by a different author without permission it is copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is very common, everybody has probably committed copyright infringement. It could be getting music from a file sharing website or it could be just using a photo you find online. While those two things are completely different, both are still technically copyright infringement. Fortunately though, not every little infringement is punished. There is a thing called fair use that lets you use small portions of copyrighted work without being punished.