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.
Article Four of the United States Constitution outlines the relationship between the various states, as well as the relationship between each state and the United States federal government. It also empowers Congress to admit new states and administer the territories and other federal lands.
Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Act of 1976. Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions.
A work of the United States government, is defined by the United States copyright law, as "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties." Under section 105 of US copyright law, such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law and are therefore in the public domain.
Copyright misuse is an equitable defence to copyright infringement in the United States based upon the doctrine of unclean hands. The misuse doctrine provides that the copyright holder engaged in abusive or improper conduct in exploiting or enforcing the copyright will be precluded from enforcing his rights against the infringer. Copyright misuse is often comparable to and draws from the older and more established doctrine of patent misuse, which bars a patentee from obtaining relief for infringement when he extends his patent rights beyond the limited monopoly conferred by the law.
The International Copyright Act of 1891 is the first U.S. congressional act that extended limited protection to foreign copyright holders from select nations. Formally known as the "International Copyright Act of 1891", but more commonly referred to as the "Chace Act" after Sen. Jonathan Chace of Rhode Island.
Golan v. Holder, 565 U.S. 302 (2012), was a Supreme Court case that dealt with copyright and the public domain. It held that the "limited time" language of the United States Constitution's Copyright Clause does not preclude the extension of copyright protections to works previously in the public domain.
The Uruguay Round Agreements Act is an Act of Congress in the United States that implemented in U.S. law the Marrakesh Agreement of 1994. The Marrakesh Agreement was part of the Uruguay Round of negotiations which transformed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) into the World Trade Organization (WTO). One of its effects is to give United States copyright protection to foreign works that had previously been in the public domain in the United States.
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.
Many films have been released to the public domain intentionally by the film's author, or because the copyright has expired.
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.
The Copyright Clause describes an enumerated power listed in the United States Constitution.
The Copyright Law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time limit, and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1927, are in the public domain.
The Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82 (1879), were a set of three cases consolidated into a single appeal before the United States Supreme Court, which in 1879 unanimously ruled that the Copyright Clause of the Constitution gave Congress no power to protect or regulate trademarks. Congress then passed the Trade Mark Act of 1881, which was based on the Commerce Clause power, and therefore passed constitutional muster.
Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc., 489 U.S. 141 (1989), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court holding a state anti-plug molding law preempted because it partially duplicated and therefore interfered with the balance Congress had struck by federal patent law. The decision reaffirmed the Supreme Court's earlier decision in Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Stiffel Co. (1964), which held a state unfair competition law preempted on the same ground.
Nimmer on Copyright is a multi-volume legal treatise on United States copyright law that is widely cited in American courts, and has been influential for decades as the leading secondary source on American copyright law.
Goldstein v. California, 412 U.S. 546 (1973), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the high court ruled that California's state statutes criminalizing record piracy did not violate the Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution.
The Copyright Act of 1870, also called the Patent Act of 1870 and the Trade Mark Act of 1870, was a revision to United States intellectual property law, covering copyrights and patents. Eight sections of the bill, sometimes called the Trade Mark Act of 1870, introduced trademarks to United States federal law, although that portion was later deemed unconstitutional after the Trade-Mark Cases.
