Copyright term

“ When an original work of art is copyrighted, but is not published by reproduction of copies for sale or distribution, it is uncertain under the law, as in the case of dramatic and musical compositions, from what date the copyright protection runs and whether the sole right of reproducing copies for sale terminates at the end of a statutory term beginning with the registration of the original work or with its publication by the reproduction of copies for sale. ”

“ The copyright term is for the life of the author and fifty years after his death, with provision that after an author's death the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council may, on allegation of the withholding of the work, require grant of license to reproduce, publish or perform it. Posthumous works, works the property of the Crown, photographs and mechanical music reproductions, are protected for fifty years ”

“ The International Copyright Union has reached in the Berlin convention almost the ideal of copyright legislation, and this has been closely followed in the Buenos Aires convention of the Pan American Union, The world over, there seems to have been a general evolution of copyright protection from the rude and imperfect recognition of intellectual property as cognate to other property, for a term indefinite and in a sense perpetual, almost impossible of enforcement in the lack of statutory protection and penalties. ”

“ Before taking up the errors assigned it may aid in the elucidation of the questions involved to briefly consider the nature of the property in copyright which it is the object of the statutes of the United States to secure and protect. A copyright, as the term imports, involves the right of publication and reproduction of works of art or literature. A copyright, as defined by Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Rawles's edition, volume 1, p. ”

“ In 1774, free culture was born. In a case called Donaldson v. Beckett in the House of Lords in England, free culture was made because copyright was stopped. In 1710, the statute of Anne said that copyright should be for a limited term of just 14 years. But in the 1740s, when Scottish publishers started reprinting classics (you gotta love the Scots) , the London publishers said "Stop!". They said, "Copyright is forever!". Sonny Bono said "Copyright should be forever minus a day", but the London publishers said "Copyright is forever".
These publishers, people whom Milton referred to as "Old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of book selling, men who do not labor in an honest profession ”

“ Therefore, under current copyright terms, virtually nothing created in the last 150 years has entered into the public domain. It is not a stretch of the imagination to postulate that many of the works still protected are long-forgotten endeavours which are no longer proving to be commercially rewarding to either the creator or the creator's children. ”

“ Compilations defined. The copyright law defines a "compilation" as a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. The law also states that the term "compilation" includes "collective works," which are works, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. ”

“ We as a society give limited property rights to creators to encourage them to produce science and culture; at the same time, we guarantee that all works eventually will become part of the public domain and, in the meantime, we give other creators and speakers the opportunity to use copyrighted material without permission or payment in some circumstances. ”

“ It would, of course, be impossible for a publisher to pay an artist the sum at which he values his entire copyright, simply that he might reproduce his picture in the form of a black-and-white block in a magazine, and it has consequently become quite common for the artist to grant a licence for any and every particular form of reproduction as it may be required, so that he may grant the right of reproduction in one particular form in one particular publication, and even for a particular period of time, reserving to himself thus the right to grant similar licences to other publishers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ First, assume that a work is protected by copyright—even if it does not include a copyright notice—unless you know it’s in the public domain. Second, copyright notices that purport to tell you what you may or may not do can’t limit your fair use rights or other rights under the Copyright Act, but they may allow you to do more than the law would otherwise permit. Third, if you agree by contract not to use a work in a particular way, you will abide by the contract. ”

“ Today, the fact that a work is out-of-print may work for, or against, fair use. That a work is out-of-print may work in favor of the copyright owner because royalties from copying are the only source of income from the work. ”

“ It has been argued that, as the two properties are so distinct, the owner of the copyright ought to have the right of access to the picture for the purpose of exercising his right to reproduce it. But it is easy to see that it would destroy the value of art property if proprietors knew that at any moment they might be forced to surrender their work for the purpose of reproduction, though for a time only. ”

“ A deposit of two copies of the article or work with the Librarian of Congress, with the name of the author and its title page, is all that is necessary to secure a copyright. It is, therefore, much more important that when the supposed author sues for a violation of his copyright, the existence of those facts of originality, of intellectual production, of thought, and conception on the part of the author should be proved, than in the case of a patent right. ”

“ The free software and open source software communities have inspired what is sometimes called ‘open content.’ Some copyright holders have made books, music, and other creative works available under licenses that give anyone permission to copy and make other uses of the works without specific permission or a royalty payment. Creative Commons hopes to build on the work of these pioneers by creating a menu of license provisions that people can combine to make their work available for copying and creative reuses (...) ”

“ Since the term of copyright in a published work is computed from the date of publication, regardless of when registration is completed, the presence of two registrations in our records covering the same published work does not raise problems as to the length of the term, However, the possibility of making a "corrective entry" should not be suggested indis­criminately. ”

“ This means that if you research a copyright question, you need only use federal sources of law such as the United States Code and decisions from federal courts.
Copyright does not place an author’s work in a lockbox. The primary purpose of copyright is not to compensate creators. The U.S. Supreme Court has stated, many times, that copyright is a means to a greater societal end: the dissemination and promotion of knowledge. [10] As librarians, we promote the dissemination of knowledge. ”

“ The CC0 license’s Statement of Purpose, which lacks any parallel in the Public Domain Dedication, may supply a useful interpretive guide to courts or other authorities called upon to construe the license insofar as it explicates and justifies the author’s conscious determination to forgo proprietary rewards in favor of building the commons. For lawyers and policymakers steeped in copyright’s historically dominant proprietary-production paradigm, this concise introduction to the open-content movement’s alternative worldview may be highly valuable. ”

“ No right of eminent domain in respect to copyrights is asserted by the United States, and the provision means only that material, otherwise copyrightable, furnished by a public officer or otherwise to the Government, becoming the property of the Government, is put freely at the service of the people. ”

“ Another test proposed is “whether you find on the part of the defendant an animus furandi—an intention to take for the purpose of saving himself labour.” No one, it has been said, has a right to take, whether with or without acknowledgment, a material and substantial portion of another’s work, his arguments, his illustrations, his authorities, for the purpose of making or improving a rival publication. When the materials are open to all, an author may acquire copyright in his selection or arrangement of them. ”

“ Does the copyright law sustain property in the mere title of a book? The tendency of thought is that the law of trade-marks affords such protection as there is for a title, as distinguished from the body or contents; that the purpose of the copyright law is to secure the exclusive right of publishing the substantial work, and that it protects the title only as being a part of the work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We do hold that the patentability of the statuettes, fitted as lamps or unfitted, does not bar copyright as works of art. Neither the Copyright Statute nor any other says that because a thing is patentable it may not be copyrighted. We should not so hold. [38]
Unlike a patent, a copyright gives no exclusive right to the art disclosed; protection is given only to the expression of the idea-not the idea itself. ”

“ Common law copyright protection for works coming within the scope of the statute would be abrogated, and the concept of publication would lose its all-embracing importance as a dividing line between common law and statutory protection and between both of these forms of legal protection and the public domain. ”

“ Any creator is free to draw from public-domain materials and to incorporate them into her own creation. [35] A growing literature recognizes the beneficial effects on creative production from the existence and availability of freely usable public-domain works. By reducing the costs creators must pay to reuse others’ creations in their own, a rich commons pays public dividends in the form of greater production of expressive works. [36] As discussed below, however, changes to U.S. copyright law over the past three decades have tended to restrict the entry of new works into the public domain. ”

“ As long as a work is in manuscript and copies are not offered for sale it enjoys the same protection, under the common law, as if properly entered for copyright. It is an infringement of copyright to copy, reprint, publish, or vend the whole or any portion of a copyright work for any purpose whatsoever. ”

“ I regard the Web today as a public domain. That means in practice the notion of copyright on it disappears: everyone can copy everyone else. Anything original risks being copied at once if copyrights are not formally registered or if works are available without payment facilities. ”

“ I think so, provided the talking-machine record was inserted in sections 5 and 18.
There should be no question but that the particular characteristic utterances of a singer, or recitationist, or of an actor, or of an orator, or the particular instrumentation of a pianist, or leader of an orchestra, etc., independent of the composition itself, whether it is copyrighted or not, should be equally entitled to protection, as a photograph or reproduction of a work of art. ”

“ How should we fit software into the categories of intellectual property? We have "writing," fixation in some medium of symbols that can be read by others—both machine and human. Writing is normally the domain of copyright. Are computer programs copyrightable? All kinds of problems present themselves. At least in the United States, copyright covers expression. ”

“ Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place. Yet copyright law seems to contemplate that compilations that consist exclusively of facts are potentially within its scope.
The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable. The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. ”

“ If the copyright owner makes the work available on the Web for a fee—either as part of a database or as a stand-alone product—or if the library can purchase reprints, the work is being commercially exploited and the exemption does not apply. ”

“ The concept of transforming a work was explored in great detail by a federal appeals court in American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, [13] which is discussed below.
The second fair use factor is the nature of the work copied. Because the purpose of copyright is to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” there is more freedom to copy or otherwise use informational, scientific, or factual works than there is for creative or expressive works. ”