Copyright

A copyright provides its holder several exclusive rights to control the
reproduction, import and export of a work of authorship (e.g., literary
work, movie, music, painting, software, mask work, etc.) Copyrights are
often held by a work's author, although, for reasons discussed below, they
may often be held by a corporation. Copyright stands in contrast to other
forms of intellectual property, such as patents, which grant a monopoly
right to the use of an invention because it is not a monopoly right to do
something, merely a right to prevent others doing it.

Copyright protects the expression of the idea, not the idea itself (unlike a
patent). So for example the idea of writing an article about copyright has
been thought of before (in every legal textbook for 100 years) but that does
not stop us writing this article. What we cannot do is copy a chunk of text
out of one of those text books.

A copyright holder typically has exclusive rights:

   * to make and sell copies of the work (including, typically, electronic
     copies)
   * to import or export the work
   * to make derivative works
   * to publicly perform the work
   * to sell or assign these rights to others.

What is meant by the phrase "exclusive right" is that the copyright holder
and only the copyright holder is allowed to do these things; everyone else
is prohibited from doing them without the copyright holder's consent.
Copyright is often called a "negative right", to stress that it has less to
do with permitting people (e.g. authors) to do anything, and more to do with
prohibiting people (e.g. readers, viewers, or listeners) from doing
something: reproducing the copyrighted work. In this way it is similar to
the Unregistered Design Right in English Law and European Law.

Note that copyright law does not restrict resale of copies of works,
provided those copies were made by or with the permission of the copyright
holder. Thus it is legal, for example, to resell a book or a CD that you
have purchased, provided you do not keep a copy for yourself. In the US this
is known as the First Sale Doctrine, and was established in the US court
system to clarify the legality of reselling books in used book stores.
Elsewhere it has other names; in the United Kingdom it is known as
"Exhaustion of rights" and is a principle which applies to other
Intellectual property rights.

Subject to moral rights, copyright also does not prohibit the owner of a
physical copy of a work from modifying, defacing, destroying, etc. the work,
so long as this does not involve duplication.

Copyright also does not prohibit all forms of copying. The fair use and fair
dealing doctrines allows limited copying of portions of a copyrighted work
in, for example, criticism, satire, or educational settings.

                 Table of contents
1 How copyrights are obtained/enforced
1.1 Copyrighting fonts
2 Rights beyond copyright
3 History of copyright
4 Critique of copyright
5 Further information on copyright inside Wikipedia
6 Further reading outside Wikipedia

How copyrights are obtained/enforced

Typically, works must meet minimal standards of originality in order to
qualify for copyright protection, and that protection expires after a set
period of time.

Different countries impose different tests, although generally the test is
low; in the United Kingdom there has to be some 'skill, originality and
work' which has gone into it. However, even fairly trivial amounts of these
qualities are sufficient.

In the United States, the original owner of the copyright may be the
employer of the actual author rather than the author himself if the work is
a "work for hire". Again, this principle is widespread; in English Law the
Copyright Designs and Patents 1988 provides that where a work in which
copyright subsists is made by an employee in the course of his employement
the copyright is automatically assigned to the employer.

Copyrights are generally enforced by the owner in a civil law court, but
there are also criminal infringement statutes. Criminal sanctions are
generally aimed at serious counterfeiting activity.

Copyrighting fonts

In the United States, font design is not copyrightable, but it is patentable
if novel enough. Stone and Lucida are the only two patented typefaces, and
this may not hold up in court.

Europe used to have the same "can't copyright typefaces" laws as the United
States, but Germany (in 1981) and the UK (in 1989) have passed laws making
typeface designs copyrightable. The UK law is even retroactive (!), so
designs produced before 1989 are also copyrighted, if the copyrights
wouldn't have already expired (the German one is not retroactive).

Rights beyond copyright

Many European countries (and other countries as a result of the GATT Trade
Related Intellectual Property or "TRIPs" agreement) further provide for
moral rights in addition to copyrights possessed by authors, such as the
right to have their work acknowledged and not be disparaged. (Famously, the
Monty Python team managed to use these rights to stop the Monty Python TV
programme being shown in the US because the US TV station was putting so
many adverts into the program the Monty Python team claimed that it was
being ruined as a serious comedy programme.)

While copyright is normally assigned or licensed to the publisher, authors
generally retain their moral rights (although in some jurisdictions these
can be excluded under contract). In most of Europe it is not possible for
authors to assign their moral rights (unlike the copyright itself, which is
regarded as an item of property which can be sold, licenced, lent, mortgaged
or given like any other property). They can agree not to enforce them (and
such terms are very common in contracts in Europe. There may also be a
requirement for the author to 'assert' these moral rights before they can be
enforced. In many books, for example, this is done on a page near the
beginning, in amongst the British Library/Library of Congress data.

Some European countries also provide for artist resale rights, which mean
that artists are entitled to a portion of the appreciation of the value of
their work each time it is sold. These rights are granted on the background
of a different tradition, which granted droits d'auteur rather than
copyright also granting all creators various moral rights beyond the
economic rights recognized in most copyright jurisdictions. (see also
parallel importation.)

History of copyright

While governments had previously granted monopoly rights to publishers to
sell printed works, the modern concept of copyright originated in 1710 with
the British Statute of Anne. This statute first recognized that authors,
rather than publishers, should be the primary beneficiary of such laws, and
it included protections for consumers of printed work ensuring that
publishers could not control their use after sale. It also limited the
duration of such exclusive rights to 28 years, after which all works would
pass into the public domain.

The Berne Convention of 1886 first established the recognition of copyrights
between sovereign nations. (Copyright protection was also provided by the
Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, but that convention is today largely
of historical interest.) Under the Berne convention, copyright is granted
automatically to creative works; an author does not have to "register" or
"apply for" copyright protection. As soon as the work is "fixed", that is,
written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically
granted all exclusive rights to the work and any derivative works unless and
until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the copyright expires.

Critique of copyright

Some think the current copyright system doesn't work in the Information
society. The general problem is that the current (international) copyright
system undermines its own goal (Boyle 1996, 142). The concept of public
domain, needed as a pool for future creators, is far too often forgotten or
repressed, due to the strong position of the concept of the romantic author,
and selective blindness for the possibilities concerning copyright that the
Internet and computers offer. Except for unlimited copying, it offers, as
said, also new ways for marketing and, more important, the possibilities of
code; much depends of course of how code is used (code can be used and is in
most of the cases also used in a positive way), but in various cases it
threatens not only the public domain in a serious way, but is also ignored
when talking about "restoring the balance" which is said to be gravely
disturbed by the so called unlimited copying possibilities the Internet
creates. [1]

Others believe that irrespective of contemporary advances in technology,
copyright has been and remains the fundamental way by which authors,
sculptors, artists, musicians and others can protect their creations from
unauthorised copying. This view espouses that copyright serves as an
incentive to creation of things such as books and art which are otherwise
not protectable at law. Without the incentive afforded by protection, such
creations would not exist.

In the US in 2003, controversial changes implemented by the Sonny Bono
Copyright Term Extension Act extending the length of copyright protection
under U.S. copyright law by 20 years were constitutionally challenged
unsuccessfully in the Supreme Court.