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"Copyright Information Notes"
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. 
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