How Long Does Copyright Last?
By Rosemary Hauschild
One of the most commonly asked questions about copyright protection is how long will the copyright last, once registered and issued by the federal government?
The term of copyright for a particular work depends on several things. The two key factors are whether or not it has been published, and, if so, the date of first publication.
As a general rule, for works created after Jan. 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years.
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We hear a great deal about credit card fraud on the internet, and illegal downloading of music gets high profile publicity. However, those are not the only illegal activities taking place online.
Copyright theft relating to ebooks, articles and software is rampant. People with no rights at all sell the software of others, sometimes even giving it away in a thieves’ bundle. The same is true of ebooks. The authors of these products may have spent months or even years working on them. They will, no doubt, have put them up for sale, either directly, through affiliates, or by selling resell rights, at a market price that will make it all worthwhile, and possibly after taking professional advice on the pricing. They will then have planned and set up all the marketing, again maybe with expensive professional advice. The owner has done all the hard work, and now expects the rewards their effort deserves.
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In many small businesses, intellectual property is an overlooked asset. The goodwill from your company name, computer programs you have written, articles, manuals, or books that you have written, logos, advertising copy, methods you have used or processes to create your products or services, all should be closely examined in conjunction with a qualified intellectual property attorney, to decide how much value they are to your business, and how they should be properly protected.
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How To Work With Your Intellectual Property Lawyer
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As you know by now, the music industry aggressively pursues file sharing networks claiming that the exchange of music on them is a copyright infringement. Well, the industry now has a problem in France.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you are probably aware of the copyright wars on the net. Nobody has more aggressively pursued copyright infringement claims than the music industry, specifically record labels and their group associations. In the United States, the industry has had great success hunting down and suing defendants whether they be file sharing networks or those dangerous criminals known as kids.
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Music Industry Runs Into Copyright Enforcement Problems In France
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Mechanically produced fonts and the characters comprising fonts are protected under UK law as typefaces. The legal definition for typefaces incorporates letters, numerals and ornamental motifs. Fonts and typefaces created for PCs, Apple computers and Linux systems however are protected are artistic works.
Electronically Created Typefaces
What is not made clear in the Act, but follows from basic principles of copyright is that electronically created fonts are protected by copyright, provided they are original. The protection is an indirect means of protecting the individual characters.
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Typefaces, Fonts And Characters - Intellectual Property Protection In The United Kingdom
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The legal protection known has “copyright” has come front and center over the past few years with major legal rulings regarding peer-to-peer networks on the Internet. Copyright protection, however, can be a confusing area of the law. This article details what can and cannot be protected by copyright.
Copyright Protection? - Yes
Copyright protects “original works of authorship” in a tangible, fixed form of expression. The material does need to be directly perceptible as long as it can be expressed with the aid of technology. A good example of this is a movie, which requires a projection device of some sort.
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Infringement. File sharing. Piracy. Counterfeiting. Plagiarism.
Whatever you call it, the theft of copyrighted material is just about impossible to control in our ever-expanding, ever-increasing digital age. In fact, there is a widely held belief that technology has made copyright impossible to enforce.
Take the entertainment industry, for example:
While all school children are taught the dangers of plagiarism of print materials when they write their first term papers, many of these same kids are some of the greatest offenders who believe that internet file sharing of their favorite music is their due simply for being fans of this or that rock or rap group.
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If a piece of work or something someone/some people have created then they should own the rights to it and therefore it belongs to them. There is of course varying degrees in how many rights they reserve and different countries more than likely have their own interpretations, but on the web this becomes a bit more of a grey area, with no-one to stringently enforce the laws, that’s not to say that if you do violate them you wont be caught.
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Well, many of us have heard of the term “Google Slap.” That is when Google is the slapper. But now Google is the one that has been slapped.
Google, the Californian company that runs the world’s most popular search engine, lost a court case in Brussels Belgium on 13 February 2007 where it was found that Google had breached copyright.
Copiepresse, a copyright protection specialist, was representing a group of 18 mostly French language newspapers who complained that Google was using “cached” links to offer free access to archived articles from the papers that were sold on a subscription basis.
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Copyright - Google Gets Slapped For Copyright Theft
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You’ll often see a copyright “notice” – the familiar © or the word
“copyright” with a date and name of the copyright owner - posted on
works of authorship. This copyright notice is no longer required for
copyright protection, but it may be a good idea to use it.
Copyright is a legal form of protection granted by the U.S. Constitution
for original works of authorship. Things such as books, plays, music,
photographs and even websites are protected by copyright law.
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Copyright Notice - Not Required But Helpful
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