Yours, Mine, Ours: Copyright Issues

With the internet affording opportunities to create and to be exposed to other people's creations, it's no surprise that copyright issues have become important.

Copyrights are issued for an original creation, the minute it's created. You hold all the rights to your creation - assuming that you're not infringing upon someone else's copyrights with that creation.

Say, for example, you write an original story and post it on the web. That's your intellectual property, which is protected under a copyright. Intellectual property is further divided into two parts: Industrial Property and Copyright.

Industrial Property is defined as "trademarks...commercial names and designations" where "Copyright relates to artistic creations, such as books, music, paintings and sculptures, films and technology-based works such as computer programs and electronic databases." A very informative guide to these terms is continued in "Understanding Copyright and Related Rights" viewable as a PDF.

If, however, you've chosen to write an alternate ending to a copyrighted movie, your work is not considered an original creation - but rather a derivative of someone else's work. Your creation, however unique, is not protected by copyright laws because it's not wholly your creation.

If you then attempt to take your derivative story and sell it to a publisher, it's a
violation that's likely to bring the movie's lawyers down upon you, brandishing all kinds of cease and desist notices and notices of copyright infringements and violations.

There's a tradition of copyright holders ignoring minor infringements such as the example of derivative stories created for fun, but when these works start becoming for-profit or used commercially, the copyright holder might start serious infringement proceedings.

Suppose that you have created something original and you want a way to share it with the world. Perhaps on your last vacation, you snapped a stunning picture of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. You hold the copyright to that image, but you'd like to allow others to use it - but not commercially.

The law, according to Creative Commons is a bit fuzzy and lacks the ability to specify how and who can use a copyrighted work with the conditions placed upon it.

That's where the Creative Commons licenses come in: they've drawn up legally binding copyright licenses allowing you to exactly specify how your picture is used. These different types are explained here.

There's even a helpful guide which asks you a few questions how you want your work to be used. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you which license is appropriate and will provide you with HTML codes (a logo) so you can display them on your website. This will inform anyone how you have copyrighted your image.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of the Creative Commons idea. This is slightly more understandable than the Creative Commons FAQ

A good example of a site that makes use of Creative Commons licensed images is the Flickr color site from last week's posting.

Further reading:
10 Big Myths about Copyright Explained

These last two articles are perhaps the most clearly written and offer the most useful guidelines for blogging and websites.
When Copying Is Okay: The "Fair Use" Rule
Getting Permission to Publish: Ten Tips for Webmasters