A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal 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.
The World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty is an international treaty on copyright law adopted by the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1996. It provides additional protections for copyright to respond to advances in information technology since the formation of previous copyright treaties before it. As of August 2023, the treaty has 115 contracting parties. The WCT and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, are together termed WIPO "internet treaties".
The first-sale doctrine is an American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property. The doctrine enables the distribution chain of copyrighted products, library lending, giving, video rentals and secondary markets for copyrighted works. In trademark law, this same doctrine enables reselling of trademarked products after the trademark holder puts the products on the market. In the case of patented products, the doctrine allows resale of patented products without any control from the patent holder. The first sale doctrine does not apply to patented processes, which are instead governed by the patent exhaustion doctrine.
Ripping is the extraction of digital content from a container, such as a CD, onto a new digital location. Originally, the term meant to rip music from Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was applied to ripping WAV or MP3 files from digital audio CDs, and after that to the extraction of contents from any storage media, including DVD and Blu-ray discs, as well as the extraction of video game sprites.
Anti-circumvention refers to laws which prohibit the circumvention of technological barriers for using a digital good in certain ways which the rightsholders do not wish to allow. The requirement for anti-circumvention laws was globalized in 1996 with the creation of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Copyright Treaty.
The Copyright Act is the federal statute governing copyright law in Canada. It is jointly administered by the Department of Industry Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage. The Copyright Act was first passed in 1921 and substantially amended in 1988 and 1997. Several attempts were made between 2005 and 2011 to amend the Act, but each of the bills failed to pass due to political opposition. In 2011, with a majority in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party introduced Bill C-11, titled the Copyright Modernization Act. Bill C-11 was passed and received Royal Assent on June 29, 2012.
An Act to amend the Copyright Act was a proposed law to amend the Copyright Act initiated by the Government of Canada in the First Session of the Thirty-Eighth Parliament. Introduced by the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Minister responsible for Status of Women Liza Frulla and then Minister of Industry David Emerson as An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, it received its First Reading in the House of Commons of Canada on June 20, 2005. On November 29, 2005, the opposition to the government tabled a non-confidence motion which passed, dissolving Parliament and effectively killing the bill. The subsequent government tabled a similar bill called C-61.
Loi DADVSI is the abbreviation of the French Loi relative au droit d’auteur et aux droits voisins dans la société de l’information. It is a bill reforming French copyright law, mostly in order to implement the 2001 Information Society Directive, which in turn implements a 1996 WIPO treaty.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, also known as the CDPA, is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that received royal assent on 15 November 1988. It reformulates almost completely the statutory basis of copyright law in the United Kingdom, which had, until then, been governed by the Copyright Act 1956 (c. 74). It also creates an unregistered design right, and contains a number of modifications to the law of the United Kingdom on Registered Designs and patents.
The "Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing United States Entrepreneurship Act of 2007" was a proposed United States copyright law that would have amended Title 17 of the U.S. Code, including portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to "promote innovation, to encourage the introduction of new technology, to enhance library preservation efforts, and to protect the fair use rights of consumers, and for other purposes." The bill would prevent courts from holding companies financially liable for copyright infringement stemming from the use of their hardware or software, and proposes six permanent circumvention exemptions to the DMCA.
The rule of the shorter term, also called the comparison of terms, is a provision in international copyright treaties. The provision allows that signatory countries can limit the duration of copyright they grant to foreign works under national treatment to no more than the copyright term granted in the country of origin of the work.
Freedom of panorama (FOP) is a provision in the copyright laws of various jurisdictions that permits taking photographs and video footage and creating other images of buildings and sometimes sculptures and other art works which are permanently located in a public place, without infringing on any copyright that may otherwise subsist in such works, and the publishing of such images. Panorama freedom statutes or case law limit the right of the copyright owner to take action for breach of copyright against the creators and distributors of such images. It is an exception to the normal rule that the copyright owner has the exclusive right to authorize the creation and distribution of derivative works.
The Copyright and Information Society Directive 2001 is a directive in European Union law that was enacted to implement the WIPO Copyright Treaty and to harmonise aspects of copyright law across Europe, such as copyright exceptions. The directive was first enacted in 2001 under the internal market provisions of the Treaty of Rome.
The WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act, is a part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 U.S. law. It has two major portions, Section 102, which implements the requirements of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and Section 103, which arguably provides additional protection against the circumvention of copy prevention systems and prohibits the removal of copyright management information.
The copyright law of Australia defines the legally enforceable rights of creators of creative and artistic works under Australian law. The scope of copyright in Australia is defined in the Copyright Act 1968, which applies the national law throughout Australia. Designs may be covered by the Copyright Act as well as by the Design Act. Since 2007, performers have moral rights in recordings of their work.
Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to produce derivative works. The copyright holder is usually the work's creator, or a publisher or other business to whom copyright has been assigned. Copyright holders routinely invoke legal and technological measures to prevent and penalize copyright infringement.
The Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984 is an act of the US Congress that makes the layouts of integrated circuits legally protected upon registration, and hence illegal to copy without permission. It is an integrated circuit layout design protection law.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of online services for copyright infringement by their users.
Stevens v Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment, was a decision of the High Court of Australia concerning the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. The appellant, Stevens, had sold and installed modchips that circumvented the Sony PlayStation's copy protection mechanism. Sony argued that Stevens had knowingly sold or distributed a "circumvention device" which was capable of circumventing a "technological protection measure", contrary to s 116A of the Copyright Act.
