Copyright Act

“ Investitive publication depends on the terms of the different statutes. A literary work must be published in the form of a book as defined by the Copyright Act, 1842 [125] . Engravings and sculpture acquire copyright upon publication, provided the name of the author and date is placed upon every copy published [126] . Paintings, drawings and photographs acquire statutory copyright although unpublished [127] . It is still a moot point whether or not public performance of a play or music is a condition precedent to statutory performing right. ”

“ At common law, an author has a property in his manuscript, and may obtain redress for any attempt to deprive him of it, and the copyright act provides that nothing in the act shall limit the right of the author, at common law, or in equity, to prevent the copying, publication or use of an unpublished work, without his consent and it gives him the right to damages should this be done. ”

“ The Supreme Court instructs that the amount of originality required to extend copyright protection to a work is exceedingly low, that only a “modicum of creativity” is needed, and that copyright protection will be provided to the work “no matter how crude, humble or obvious it might be.” Feist, 499 U.S. at 345–46, 111 S.Ct. 1282.
The Copyright Act itself specifically lists “annotations” in the works entitled to copyright protection. 17 U.S.C. § 101. A long line of cases recognizes copyright protection for annotated cases and statutes. ”

“ The gist of this decision is that the statute gave the right of exclusive publication of copies, and gave the proprietor of the copyright no remedy; hence, the common law supplied one.
As we shall have occasion to see, the American copyright act does give special remedies to the owner of a copyright of maps. Inadequate it may be to fully protect the property in the copyright, yet such as Congress has seen fit to give, and which it, not the courts, have power to enlarge by amendment of the statutes. ”

“ The general rule that legislative codifications are uncopyrightable derives from an understanding of the nature of law and the basic idea that the People, as the reservoir of all sovereignty, are the source of our law. For purposes of the Copyright Act, this means that the People are the constructive authors of those official legal promulgations of government that represent an exercise of sovereign authority. And because they are the authors, the People are the owners of these works, meaning that the works are intrinsically public domain material and, therefore, uncopyrightable. ”

“ The evolution of these provisions in the legislation that ultimately became the Copyright Act of 1976, and the pattern of case law construing those provisions, both show that Congress’s attention was focused on redressing unremunerative transfers made by authors in the face of superior bargaining power: [24] a policy that, whatever its normative appeal, clearly has no application to the peer-production phenomenon. The need to address the termination issue draws added force from recent cases applying traditional copyright principles to open-content licenses. ”

“ Fair Use (Section 107)
Copyright owners’ rights are important, but Congress did not put copyrighted works in a lockbox. A copyright owner does not have an absolute monopoly over the use of his or her work; owners’ rights are subject to other provisions of the Copyright Act that permit certain uses of copyrighted works. ”

“ Taking it as a whole, the Copyright Act, 1911, is a valuable measure in the interests of literature and art. It may be said that the Government has made too many concessions, both to the socialistic demands of the members of the Labour Party, who believe that there should be no copyright, and to the demands of the makers of mechanical instruments, who appealed to the Government to save a great industry from possible bankruptcy. ”

“ Congress should recognize the peer production phenomenon as an essential change in the baseline assumptions that prevailed at the time of the Copyright Act of 1976—a change that demands its own recognition in positive law. ”

“ Although a number of judge-made doctrines may be invoked to restrict termination of a license granted for the benefit of the public, the better course would be for Congress to enact new legislation expressly authorizing authors to make a nonwaiveable, irrevocable dedication of their works, in whole or in part, to the use and benefit of the public—a possibility that the Patent Act expressly recognizes, but the Copyright Act presently does not. ”

“ The Copyright Clause and the Copyright Act both recognize that the United States has an important interest in protecting the intellectual property of its citizens and of those whose creative efforts enrich our lives. In this increasingly interconnected world, securing appropriate protection abroad also is important. ”

“ The common-law doctrine of fair use, for example, began—and, even after receiving express statutory recognition in the Copyright Act of 1976, [3] continues to evolve—as a judge-made exception to the statutory exclusive rights of copyright holders. [4] So viewed, recent decisions may be creating what amounts to a judge-made exception to the liability rules of the DMCA—what is in substance, even if it has not been so labeled by the courts, an emerging doctrine of “fair circumvention.” ”

“ Owner may sell or otherwise dispose of a lawful copy: but may not lease or lend sound recordings or computer programs for direct or indirect commercial advantage library/school lending exemption of sound recordings and computer programs is permitted Under section 106 (3) of the Copyright Act, the right to distribute a copyrighted work is reserved to the copyright owner. But the distribution is limited by the "first sale doctrine", found in section 109 of the Act. ”

“ Rights accorded under the national treatment provisions may not be subject to any formality, such as registration requirements. [2] Member countries are free to and some do impose formalities on the exercise of rights in relation to domestic copyright works. In the United States, for example, the Copyright Act of 1976 establishes a requirement that copyright owners register their work with the Copyright Office before they can commence a civil action for infringement of their work. ”

“ Existing U.S. law, however, may not comfortably accommodate a transfer “to the detriment of Affirmer’s heirs and successors” that “shall not be subject to . . . termination,” [227] nor an “irrevocable . . . license [.] ” [228] Such provisions may run afoul of the termination rights the Copyright Act confers upon the authors of expressive works, which cannot be waived or contracted away. [229]
Existing law, in sum, poses a number of obstacles to the growth of the public domain as a commons of freely reusable expressive works. ”

“ Its purpose is simply to secure to the man who has created it a species of property which peculiarly requires the protection of law, because the very act which makes it remunerative to him lays it open to expropriation—that is, the act of publication—and seems peculiarly entitled to the protection of the law, because it is that act, and that alone, which makes it of any use to the public ”

“ The courts might, for example, modify the existing doctrine of copyright abandonment to permit partial, conditional, irrevocable abandonments of copyright rights, to the permanent detriment of authors and their heirs. Alternatively, the courts might extend their current practice of borrowing provisions from the Patent Act when construing the Copyright Act. [25] The Patent Act presently includes several provisions that permit creators expressly to abandon rights in their creations and dedicate their works permanently to the public domain. ”

“ That these "authors" may be more generous, or less sophisticated, than the large and well-funded code-writing organizations before us hardly furnishes a reason to approve an open-ended test of authorship of the law. ↑ We are not stating or holding that the authorship of government works never presents a legitimate issue of copyright. On the contrary, the Copyright Act carefully defines the extent to which federal government employees and contractors can obtain copyright protection. ”

“ You have provided no evidence on sufficient creative input or intervention by a human author in the Work. We conclude, therefore, that the Work lacks the human authorship necessary to sustain a claim in copyright. The various legal and policy arguments put forth in your request for reconsideration are insufficient to convince the Office to abandon its longstanding interpretation of the Copyright Act, Supreme Court, and lower court judicial precedent that a work meets the legal and formal requirements of copyright protection only if it is created by a human author. ”

“ Where copyright in any work has been infringed, the owner of the copyright shall, except as otherwise provided by this Act, be entitled to all such remedies by way of injunction or interdict, damages, accounts, and otherwise, as are or may be conferred by law for the infringement of a right. ”

“ Answering yes, the district court granted partial summary judgment in favor of the private organizations that brought this suit and issued injunctions prohibiting all unauthorized reproduction of their works. In doing so, the court held that, notwithstanding serious constitutional concerns, copyright persists in incorporated standards and that the Copyright Act’s “fair use” defense does not permit wholesale copying in such situations. ”

“ The new British measure comprehensively defines infringement as the doing without consent of the owner of the copyright of "anything the sole right to do which is by this act conferred on the owner of the copyright," but specifically excepts (1) fair dealing for private study, research, criticism, review or newspaper summary; (2) use by an artist of sketches, etc., made for a work of which he has sold the copyright, provided he does not repeat or imitate that work; (3) graphic reproduction of objects, or photographing of paintings, etc., in a public place ”

“ The Constitution’s Copyright Clause grants Congress the power to “promote the Progress of Science...by securing for limited Times to Authors...the exclusive Right to their respective Writings.” Art. I, § 8, cl. 8 (emphasis added) . The statute before us, the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extends the term of most existing copyrights to 95 years and that of many new copyrights to 70 years after the author’s death. ”

“ An author is entitled to the benefit of every right afforded by copyright law, but only 'upon complying with the provisions of' that law. Congress has provided for a grant of monopoly privileges under copyright for a term which may extend by renewal to fifty-six years for those who do comply. Petitioner having conceded that it disobeyed a plain requirement of the Act designed to inform and protect the public, I cannot agree that it should recover damages under the very law it admittedly disobeyed. ”

“ The ongoing vitality of “commons-based peer production” [15] of informational goods depends critically upon the assumption that the governing licenses will make earlier users’ contributions freely available in perpetuity for later users to copy, modify, and redistribute. [16] The termination provisions of the Copyright Act, however, may call that assumption into doubt. ”

“ The provision as actually adopted was a compromise upholding the negative right of the author to prevent mechanical reproduction, but requiring him, in the event of a grant of authority to any one manufacturer to reproduce his work mechanically, to extend that privilege to any other manufacturer on payment of the specified royalty. This scheme is practically modeled on what was known as the Pearsall-Smith royalty plan, which, as proposed for books, was stoutly fought by the proponents of the copyright act of 1891, throughout that memorable copyright campaign. ”

“ While the nature of the property and the protection intended to be given the inventor or author as the reward of genius or intellect in the production of his book or work of art is to be considered in construing the act of Congress, it is evident that to secure the author the right to multiply copies of his work may be said to have been the main purpose of the copyright statutes. ”

“ These words are intended to bring under protection all forms of user which are transitory and fleeting and do not consist in the making of any permanent record of the work. Performing right is no longer confined to dramatic and musical works, but is extended to all classes of works protected by the Act, so that wherever any original element in a work can be turned to profit by some form of transitory representation, the exclusive right of making such use of the work is primâ facie vested in the author as part of his copyright. ”

“ No copyright vests in the proprietor of a collective work unless the author is employed under a contract of service or apprenticeship, or there is an assignment in writing; and when the copyright vests in the proprietor of a periodical by reason of a contract of service or apprenticeship, the author may restrain separate publication. The passing of the copyright by reason of the work having been executed on commission is confined to the cases of engravings, photographs and portraits. The self-governing dominions are given a free hand in copyright matters. ”

“ C What copyright-related benefits might justify the statute’s extension of copyright protection? First, no one could reasonably conclude that copyright’s traditional economic rationale applies here. The extension will not act as an economic spur encouraging authors to create new works. See Mazer, 347 U.S., at 219 (The “economic philosophy” of the Copyright Clause is to “advance public welfare” by “encourag [ing] individual effort” through “personal gain”) ; see also ante, at 212, n.18 (“ [C] opyright law serves public ends by providing individuals with an incentive to pursue private ones”) . ”