Basics: Infringement and Fair Use

The rights of a copyright holder are infringed when one of the acts requiring the authorization of the owner is done by someone else without his consent. In the case of copyright infringement or the violation of neighboring rights the remedies for the copyright owner consist of civil redress. The unauthorized copying of protected works for commercial purposes and the unauthorized commercial dealing in copied material is usually referred to as "piracy".

Yet copyright laws also provide that the rights of copyright owners are subject to the doctrine of "fair use". That allows the reproduction and use of a work, notwithstanding the rights of the author, for limited purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and research. Fair use may be described as the privilege to use the copyrighted material in a reasonable manner without the owner's consent. To determine whether a use is fair or not most copyright laws consider:

- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (usually certain types of educational copying are allowed)

- the nature of the copyrighted work (mostly originals made for commercial reasons are less protected than their purely artistic counterparts)

- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (as a general rule copying may be permitted if it is unlikely to cause economic harm to the original author)

Examples of activities that may be excused as fair use include: providing a quotation in a book review; distributing copies of a section of an article in class for educational purposes; and imitating a work for the purpose of parody or social commentary.

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Copyright Management and Control Systems: Pre-Infringement

Pre-infringement copyright management and control systems that inhibit or control infringement of intellectual property may be put into place by copyright owners before distributing their works. Examples are:

Contracts

Contracts are a pre-infringement control method, which very often is underestimated. Properly formed contracts enable copyright holders to restrict the use of their works in excess of the rights granted under copyright laws.

Copy Protection

This approach was standard in the 1980s, but rejected by consumers and relatively easy to break. Still copy protection, whereby the vendor limits the number of times a file can be copied, is used in certain situations.

Limited Functionality

This method allows copyright owners to provide a copy of the work, which is functionally limited. Software creators, for example, can distribute software that cannot print or save. A fully functional version has to be bought from the vendor.

Date Bombs

Here the intellectual property holder distributes a fully functional copy but locks off access at a pre-specified date or after a certain number of uses.

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Neighboring rights

Copyright laws generally provide for three kinds of neighboring rights: 1) the rights of performing artists in their performances, 2) the rights of producers of phonograms in their phonograms, and 3) the rights of broadcasting organizations in their radio and television programs. Neighboring rights attempt to protect those who assist intellectual creators to communicate their message and to disseminate their works to the public at large.

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Copyright management information

Copyright management information refers to information which identifies a work, the author of a work, the owner of any right in a work, or information about the terms and conditions of the use of a work, and any numbers or codes that represent such information, when any of these items of information are attached to a copy of a work or appear in connection with the communication of a work to the public.

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