Copyright law gives authors exclusive rights to their works, except when it doesn’t. In other words, U.S. law places some limitations on copyright owners’ rights. Copyright is not perpetual. Folks can occasionally make use of a copyrighted work without permission or compensation (fair use). And some exceptions are made for libraries and archives, under Section [...]

WASHINGTON — Join me in celebrating World IP Day, and yes, let’s emphasize the word “World.” Here at the Copyright Alliance we tend to focus on U.S. artists and creators, but creativity and cultural contributions are global. International treaties provide rights under law to artists around the world, but that doesn’t mean their own countries [...]

WASHINGTON — It’s World IP Day again, did you get all of your celebratory cards in the mail? No harm if you didn’t, but the ten-year-old designation by the World Intellectual Property Organization has been celebrated the last five years by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) with an event on Capitol Hill, and today [...]

DENVER — This is our second year participating in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Annual Conference, and a true highlight of this show occurred last night when Pulitzer-Prize winning author Michael Chabon addressed a ballroom filled with writers to its absolute brim, like a dreamy girl’s pockets after a day of collecting [...]

If you get your hands on 18 million books you don’t own, make full copies of them, and look to profit from them online, expect a bit of legal trouble. Google’s latest headache is from photographers and illustrators. You go, visual artists! Let me say up front that while the Copyright Alliance didn’t play a [...]

DENVER — Lucinda Dugger and I spoke before a gathering of photographers here at a dinner sponsored by one of our members, the Advertising Photographers of America (in particular, their LA-Denver chapter). I did my song-and-dance about what’s happening in copyright policy (the suit filed that morning by photographers and illustrators against Google certainly made [...]

The core principle of copyright is that the creator and copyright owner has the right to reproduction, distribution, public performance and the creation of derivative works of his or her creativity. Take that away and copyright is meaningless. Some would like that result. Others want to keep placing limits on those rights by expanding fair [...]

I came across a breath of fresh air today from the academic community — a professor who takes offense at the notion that unauthorized infringement of a creator’s works should be viewed as some kind of a just social movement. U. of California at Berkeley Law Professor Peter S. Menell has authored a short work [...]

While snowbound this week I read some pieces in The Washington Post about condescension. The first author wrote a piece titled “Why are liberals so condescending?” He maintained that liberals are “committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but [...]

It would appear to be a victory. Last week, we here at the Copyright Alliance reported on a brazenly infringing web site, a site that encouraged people to upload professional images over which they held no legal rights. These images were then published on the site in magazine form. The magazine was called Pilfered Magazine, [...]