A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term "intellectual property" began to be used in the 19th century, though it was not until the late 20th century that intellectual property became commonplace in the majority of the world's legal systems.
Criticism of copyright, perhaps outright anti-copyright sentiment, is a dissenting view of the current state of copyright law or copyright as a concept. Critical groups often discuss philosophical, economical, or social rationales of such laws and the laws' implementations, the benefits of which they claim do not justify the policy's costs to society. They advocate for changing the current system, though different groups have different ideas of what that change should be. Some call for remission of the policies to a previous state—copyright once covered few categories of things and had shorter term limits—or they may seek to expand concepts like fair use that allow permissionless copying. Others seek the abolition of copyright itself.
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity is a 2004 book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license on March 25, 2004.
The copyright law of Canada governs the legally enforceable rights to creative and artistic works under the laws of Canada. Canada passed its first colonial copyright statute in 1832 but was subject to imperial copyright law established by Britain until 1921. Current copyright law was established by the Copyright Act of Canada which was first passed in 1921 and substantially amended in 1988, 1997, and 2012. All powers to legislate copyright law are in the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada by virtue of section 91(23) of the Constitution Act, 1867.
The software patent debate is the argument about the extent to which, as a matter of public policy, it should be possible to patent software and computer-implemented inventions. Policy debate on software patents has been active for years. The opponents to software patents have gained more visibility with fewer resources through the years than their pro-patent opponents. Arguments and critiques have been focused mostly on the economic consequences of software patents.
Industrial property is one of two subsets of intellectual property, it takes a range of forms, including patents for inventions, industrial designs, trademarks, service marks, layout-designs of integrated circuits, commercial names and designations, geographical indications and protection against unfair competition. In some cases, aspects of an intellectual creation, although present, are less clearly defined. The object of industrial property consists of signs conveying information, in particular to consumers, regarding products and services offered on the market. Protection is directed against unauthorized use of such signs that could mislead consumers, and against misleading practices in general.
World Intellectual Property Day is observed annually on 26 April. The event was established by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2000 to "raise awareness of how patents, copyright, trademarks and designs impact on daily life" and "to celebrate creativity, and the contribution made by creators and innovators to the development of societies across the globe". 26 April was chosen as the date for World Intellectual Property Day because it coincides with the date on which the Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization entered into force in 1970.
The Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement is a loose collection of civil society groups, governments, and individuals converging on the idea that access to knowledge should be linked to fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development.
James Packard Love is the director of Knowledge Ecology International, formerly known as the Consumer Project on Technology, a non-governmental organization with offices in Washington, D.C. and Geneva, that works mainly on matters concerning knowledge management and governance, including intellectual property policy and practice and innovation policy, particularly as they relate to health care and access to knowledge.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to intellectual property:
The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is an international legal agreement between all the member nations of the World Trade Organization (WTO). It establishes minimum standards for the regulation by national governments of different forms of intellectual property (IP) as applied to nationals of other WTO member nations. TRIPS was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) between 1989 and 1990 and is administered by the WTO.
The philosophy of copyright considers philosophical issues linked to copyright policy, and other jurisprudential problems that arise in legal systems' interpretation and application of copyright law.
Limitations and exceptions to copyright are provisions, in local copyright law or Berne Convention, which allow for copyrighted works to be used without a license from the copyright owner.
The copyright term is the length of time copyright subsists in a work before it passes into the public domain. In most of the world, this length of time is the life of the author plus either 50 or 70 years.
Copyright abolition is a movement to abolish copyright, for example by repealing the Statute of Anne and all subsequent law made in its support. The notion of anti-copyright combines a group of ideas and ideologies that advocate changing the current copyright law. It often focuses on the negative philosophical, economic, or social consequences of copyright, and that it has never been a benefit to society, but instead serves to enrich a few at the expense of creativity. Some anti-author groups may question the logic of copyright on economic and cultural grounds. The members of this movement are in favor of a full or partial change or repeal of the current copyright law. Copyright and patents are widely rejected among anarchists, communists, socialists, free market libertarians, crypto-anarchists, info-anarchists, and the former Situationist International.
Copyright for Creativity - A Declaration for Europe issued on 5 May 2010, is intended as a statement of how copyright policy could be constructed in the Internet Age. It comes against the background of political debate within Europe to rethink copyright in an era where the use of digital content without paying fees to the creators is part of the business model for some of the largest global internet platforms. Interests of content creators and online platform providers collide. The declaration has been written by a group from political party "European People's Party (EPP)" The Declaration focuses on both the exclusive rights and the limitations and exceptions to existing copyright rulings and standards.
Shamnad Basheer was an Indian legal scholar and founder of the blog SpicyIP. He was also the founder of IDIA, a trust which works on making legal education accessible for underprivileged students. Basheer was a Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the WBNUJS, Kolkata, and the Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University Law School, and a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Center (OIPRC). He founded several initiatives such as SpicyIP, IDIA, P-PIL and Lex Biosis. Basheer intervened in the landmark Novartis case, filed a number of other public interest litigations and took initiative to bring about changes in the IPR regime in India.
The protection of intellectual property (IP) of video games through copyright, patents, and trademarks, shares similar issues with the copyrightability of software as a relatively new area of IP law. The video game industry itself is built on the nature of reusing game concepts from prior games to create new gameplay styles but bounded by illegally direct cloning of existing games, and has made defining intellectual property protections difficult since it is not a fixed medium.
Nancy T. Gallini is an economist, professor emeritus, researcher, and author. She is a professor emeritus at the Vancouver School of Economics based in the University of British Columbia. She has served on multiple editorial boards such as American Economic Review, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of Economic Literature and the Journal of Industrial Economics. In 2008, Dr. Gallini was appointed as a member to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. From 2011-2014 Dr. Gallini served on the executive council for the Canadian Economic Association. Her research "focuses on the economics of intellectual property, competition policy, strategic alliances, licensing, and optimal patent policy". She is the co-author of Competition Policy and Intellectual Property Rights in the Knowledge-Based Economy. She has won numerous awards and a fellowship throughout her career. She has received 8 research grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. These grants are one SSHRC Leave Fellowship, one SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship and six SSHRC Research Grants.
