United States

In 1998, Congress passed a controversial new law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Through the DMCA, Congress attempted to adapt U.S. copyright law to the challenges posed by digital technologies and the online environment. Although the DMCA as a whole extended the reach of copyright law and is generally regarded as favoring the interests of copyright owners, it also created provisions limiting the liability of certain online actors. Section 512 of the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. § 512, contains the DMCA's "safe-harbor" provisions for online service providers. These safe harbor provisions shield online service providers, like ISPs, hosting providers, search engines, and website operators, from copyright infringement claims made against them based on the conduct of their customers or users. To take advantage of the safe-harbor provisions, online service providers need to implement "notice-and-takedown" procedures that call for expeditious removal of content upon receipt of a formally valid takedown notice from a copyright owner. The DMCA's notice-and-takedown procedures could impact your online publishing work in a variety of ways:   read more »

A widely held misconception is that works on the Internet are in the public domain and thus can be used freely. This is not true. Copyright law applies to online material just as it does to offline material, assuming the prerequisites for copyright protection are met. Thus, if you use someone else's work, you could be liable for what is called "copyright infringement." Basically, copyright infringement exists if you exercise one or more of the exclusive rights held by a copyright owner. A copyright owner enjoys the following exclusive rights:

• to reproduce the work in copies
• to prepare derivative works based upon the work
• to distribute copies of the work to the public
• to perform the work
• to display the copyrighted work
• and, in the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission

See Rights Granted Under Copyright for more discussion.

In order to bring a successful claim of copyright infringement in the context of copying, for example, the plaintiff must:   read more »

You may come across digital works that contain copyright controls, such as digital rights management (DRM) technology or a software copy protection system. As a general matter, you should not circumvent these copyright controls, or you may face civil and criminal penalties under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Some copyright owners embed a form of DRM into their digital work in order to control its use and distribution. Typically, copyright controls come in two flavors:

1. access-control measures designed to keep you from accessing the work; and
2. copy-control measures that limit what you can do with the work after you have access (e.g., whether you can copy the work, how many copies can be made, how long you can have possesion of the work, and the like).

The DMCA prohibits circumventing access-control measures. 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1). For example, if you cannot watch a particular copyrighted DVD on your laptop because of an encryption system, the DMCA makes it unlawful for you to bypass this access-control measure. Access-control measures may also be found on eBooks, Internet streaming platforms, and password-protected sections of websites, among other things. Note that there is no ban on the act of circumventing copy-control measures, but it is illegal for anyone to provide you with the technological tools to do so. In any event, some copyright holders merge access-control and copy-control measures in the same DRM system, making it impossible to circumvent copy-controls (which is not prohibited) without circumventing access-controls (which is prohibited).   read more »

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The policy behind copyright law is not simply to protect the rights of those who produce content, but to "promote the progress of science and useful arts." U.S. Const. Art. I, § 8, cl. 8. Because allowing authors to enforce their copyrights in all cases would actually hamper this end, first the courts and then Congress have adopted the fair use doctrine in order to permit uses of copyrighted materials considered beneficial to society, many of which are also entitled to First Amendment protection. Fair use will not permit you to merely copy another’s work and profit from it, but when your use contributes to society by continuing the public discourse or creating a new work in the process, fair use may protect you.

Section 107 of the Copyright Act defines fair use as follows:

You may want to use or incorporate someone else's work into your own. While the works of others may be protected by copyright, there are a class of works that fall outside the scope of copyright law. The following categories of work are not eligible for copyright protection, regardless of when they were created and whether or not they bear a copyright notice.

• Facts
• Works created by the United States Government
• Works not fixed in a tangible form of expression
• Ideas, concepts, principles, or discoveries
• Words, phrases, or familiar symbols

Additionally, even works that qualify for copyright protection fall into the public domain after a certain period of time.

Facts

You can use facts in your online work without the fear of liability because facts are not protected under copyright law. As we explain in the section on Copyrightable Subject Matter, copyright protection applies to "original works of authorship." Although the level of creativity required to be "original" is extremely low, facts do not have the requisite level of creativity. For example, baseball scores, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and the number of people at a protest are noncopyrightable facts.   read more »

A broad array of creative, expressive media are subject to copyright protection, including literature, photographs, music compositions and recordings, films, paintings and sculptures, and news articles – any “original work of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.” 17 U.S.C. § 102. For more information on copyright creation and ownership see the Copyright Ownership section of this legal guide.

If you are the copyright owner of a work (and you likely will be if you created the work), such as an article, a blog post, a photograph, or a video, you can authorize others to use it. You can do this by transferring to the person or entity that wants to use your work any or all of your rights as a copyright owner, or any subdivision of those rights. Alternatively, you can license any or all of those rights (or any subdivision of them) to that person or entity.   read more »