Copyright Information
For information about copyright basics, see the web page for the US Copyright Office.
For information about copyrights on the Internet see the article, Copyrights in Cyberspace below.
Copyright regulations are complicated, but you need to know enough so you can obey the law. Ignoring a copyright might cost less, but it’s illegal and unethical.
For more information please e-mail NPH’s copyright and permissions send an email to permissions, or call (414) 615-5706.
Copyrights in CyberSpace
While browsing on an electronic bulletin board, you come across an interesting article , you download it, print it out, and reprint it in the next issue of your newsletter.
Oops?you’ve probably just violated federal law!
Don’t worry?you won’t be hauled off to the federal pen. The law you ran afoul of is copyright law, which gives authors, composers, and others who create works of expression certain rights over their creations.
You would probably think about copyright rules if you wanted to republish a chapter of a book, play, or song you liked. But the rules are easy to overlook when you’re dealing with electronic media. Those bits of information fly around so rapidly and can be reproduced so easily that it’s hard to remember that someone out there very likely owns the right to determine when and how copies are made and used.
All works of expression have at least one thing in common: they are protected by copyright as soon as they are created and fixed in a tangible medium. For the most part, once an expression is entered into a computer in a form that can be read on screen or routed to a printer, it is considered fixed in a tangible medium, even if it is never printed out or saved to a disk. A copyright notice? (that little © followed by the year and the author’s name?) is not required but is recommended, to remind people that the author claims a copyright.
Unless there has been a formal written transfer of ownership or an expression is created as a work for hire or paid for by an employer, the person who enters an expression into a computer for other people to see usually owns the copyright on that expression.
As a starting point, therefore, you can assume that you control the right to use any expression that you author and put online. The important corollary is that any expressions you find online are probably controlled by someone else and shouldn’t be used without permission.
Adapted from "Cyberights in Cyberspace" by Steve Elias. Reprinted with permission from the Summer 1994 issue of the Nolo News, published by Nolo Press, Berkeley, CA. To receive a free copy call (800) 992-6656.