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.
A legal treatise is a scholarly legal publication containing all the law relating to a particular area, such as criminal law or trusts and estates. There is no fixed usage on what books qualify as a "legal treatise," with the term being used broadly to define books written for practicing attorneys and judges, textbooks for law students, and explanatory texts for laypersons. The treatise may generally be loose leaf bound with rings or posts so that updates to laws covered by the treatise and annotated by the editor may be added by the subscriber to the legal treatise.
The work was originally published in 1963 by Melville Nimmer, and was for several decades the only significant treatise in United States copyright law. In 1985, Melville's son David Nimmer took over updates and revisions to Nimmer on Copyright. The work is routinely cited by domestic and foreign courts at all levels in copyright litigation, and within the United States in at least 2500 judicial opinions.
Melville Bernard Nimmer was an American lawyer and law professor, renowned as an expert in freedom of speech and United States copyright law.
David Nimmer is an American lawyer, law professor, renowned as an expert in United States copyright law. He received an A.B. with distinction and honors in 1977 from Stanford University and his J.D. in 1980 from Yale Law School, where he served as editor of the Yale Law Journal. David Nimmer is of counsel to Irell & Manella LLP in Los Angeles, California. He also serves as a Professor from Practice at University of California, Los Angeles Law School and Distinguished Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. In 2000, he was elected to the American Law Institute. He has served as a guest professor at the University of Haifa, Yeshiva University, the University of Miami, and Syracuse University.
The United States Copyright Office held a special celebration on May 6, 2013, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Nimmer on Copyright. [1] [2] Similarly, the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. published a special issue of the Journal dedicated to the 50th anniversary, in Winter 2013. [3]
The Copyright Society of the U.S.A. is the primary scholarly society dedicated to the study of copyright law in the United States.
Fair use is a doctrine in the law of the United States that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works by allowing as a defense to copyright infringement claims certain limited uses that might otherwise be considered infringement.
Originality is the aspect of created or invented works as being new or novel, and thus distinguishable from reproductions, clones, forgeries, or derivative works.
An original work is one not received from others nor one copied from or based upon the work of others.. It is a work created with a unique style and substance.
The term "originality" is often applied as a compliment to the creativity of artists, writers, and thinkers. The modern idea of originality is tied to Romanticism, by a notion that is often called romantic originality.
Pierre Nelson Leval is a Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. At the time of his appointment by President Bill Clinton in 1993, he was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether a particular work can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not. In this context, "originality" refers to "coming from someone as the originator/author", rather than "never having occurred or existed before".
The copyright law of Switzerland is based on the concept of "author's rights", which is similar to the French copyright law, instead of the concept of Copyright used in common law jurisdictions. The current copyright law of Switzerland is the Swiss Federal Copyright Act of 1992, which dates from October 9, 1992 and has only seen minor revisions since then. In October 2007, a revision was approved in order to implement the WIPO Copyright Treaty in the act, a process started in 2004 with the release by the Swiss Federal Council of a draft project.
Sweat of the brow is an intellectual property law doctrine, chiefly related to copyright law. According to this doctrine, an author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, such as a database, or a directory. Substantial creativity or "originality" is not required.
Raymond Nimmer was an attorney and former Dean of the University of Houston Law Center in Houston, Texas, United States. Raymond Theodore Nimmer was born in Illinois May 2, 1944. He died January 24, 2018 in Houston, Texas.
The intellectual property rights on photographs are protected in different jurisdictions by the laws governing copyright and moral rights. In some cases photography may be restricted by civil or criminal law. Publishing certain photographs can be restricted by privacy or other laws. Photography can be generally restricted in the interests of public morality and the protection of children.
Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright law without permission, infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works. The copyright holder is typically 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.
In July 2009, lawyers representing the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) sent an email letter warning of possible legal action for alleged copyright infringement to Derrick Coetzee, an editor/administrator of the free content multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Roger M. Milgrim is an intellectual property lawyer, and the author of two multivolume law treatises: Milgrim on Trade Secrets and Milgrim on Licensing. Beginning in about 2007, these two treatises were updated by Eric E. Bensen, of the New York Bar, and Roger Milgrim. These two treatises are companions to other major intellectual property treatises in the LexisNexis IP series, which includes Chisum on Patents and Nimmer on Copyright, which are cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts, including by the Court in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment LLC, 135 S. Ct. 2401, 2408 (2015). In late 2012 Milgrim's Guide to IP Licensing was published Wolters Kluwer.
Edward J. Damich is a Senior Judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims, appointed to that court in 1998 by President Bill Clinton, and elevated to Chief Judge in 2002 by President George W. Bush.
The monkey selfie copyright dispute is a series of disputes about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British nature photographer David Slater. The disputes involve Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the macaque should be assigned the copyright.
In Getaped.com, Inc. v. Cangemi, Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was presented with the novel issue of whether a copyrightable work made available over the internet could be considered published under the Copyright Act of 1976. Through analogy to traditional physical distribution, the court held that this indeed constituted publication.
Diversey v. Schmidly, 738 F. 3d 1196 is an American federal copyright case from the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The case addresses several important issues in U.S. copyright law, including the three-year statute of limitations, the making available right, the doctrine of fair use, and contributory infringement.
