Currently viewing the category: "Copyright Information Notes"

Curb your enthusiasm

On January 4, 2011 By

Happy New Year to all!

Just before and after the first of the new year, I saw a flurry of e-mails and blog posts celebrating this year’s Public Domain Day.  January 1 is the day on which all the material whose copyright expired during the previous year officially rises into the public domain and becomes [...]

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Don’t take my word for it

On August 23, 2010 By

There are two things that persistently bother me about the musing I post to this blog.  The first is very general — so often I sound like Chicken Little, crying that the sky is falling.  Readers might well ask if things are really as bad as I make them sound in the copyright arena, although [...]

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“Renewing copyright” and a reflection on versions

On February 2, 2010 By

In a post about two months ago I promised that I would offer a link to the article I wrote on reforming copyright law from the perspective of academic libraries.  That article was published this month in portal: Libraries and the Academy, and is now also available in DukeSpace, the open access repository at [...]

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An amusing chance to review some key ideas

On January 15, 2010 By

There are probably many readers out there who know who Vanessa Hudgens is.  I did not, until I saw some blog posts reporting on her ongoing lawsuit against website owners who apparently posted nude photos of the actress and singer without her permission; see this report (without the pictures) on the TechDirt site.  Not, [...]

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Writing about reform

On November 23, 2009 By

Every now and then, a law review article on copyright comes along that is so good that I feel I have to recommend it.  I am well aware that most of my readers are neither lawyers nor legal scholars, and the length and stilted format of law review articles can be off-putting.  But Professor Jessica [...]

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New (and not so new) resources

On June 2, 2009 By

I am delighted to be able to link to a whole new group of resource for understanding and teaching others about copyright law and user rights.  Since most of these resources are video, they offer a nice supplement to the text resources I have listed here and here.

First, because it is the [...]

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Sorting out exceptions

On February 5, 2009 By

A couple of recent issues that have crossed my desk have drawn my attention to an aspect of copyright law that has the potential to be very confusing. Many people recognize that copyright works by granting a bundle of exclusive rights to a copyright holder for a limited time, then defining a long series [...]

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Copyright in laws

On September 10, 2008 By

While it could be said that trademark and patent are close cousins to copyright law, there is no such thing as copyright’s in-laws.  The real question is, should there be copyright in laws?

Most people know at least vaguely that government works in the US are not subject to copyright protection.  Of course, nothing is [...]

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Copyright use case on a Grecian Urn

On September 6, 2008 By

A colleague recently asked my opinion about an interesting question.  Would there be any copyright interest held by a museum that was displaying a classical vase for the first time?  The root of the question was the idea that if the museum was displaying an object that had recently been unearthed (quite literally), it might [...]

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Copyright FAQ for government works.

On September 3, 2008 By

There is a nice website, just updated in August, that addresses a great many copyright questions as they relate to works created by the U.S. federal government, under contract with the government, or using government funding.  The site is created by CENDI (the Commerce, Energy, NASA, Defense Information Managers Group), and also provides [...]

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