It challenges a 1994 law that seems to give publishers the right to re-copyright works already in the public domain.
YouTube compares content that is uploaded to huge numbers of files of copyright works supplied by content owners, as do external agencies contracted to content owners.
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Obviously, the fact that Runic was made up of members of the creative teams from those games added a degree of hilarity to that exchange, but more to the point it demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of how copyright works.
Reversing a lower court in a closely watched case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has determined that a trade treaty that restores copyright protection to foreign works previously in the public domain is not unconstitutional.
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In 1999, Congress again extended the copyright term for pre-1978 works like Superman by another 20 years and gave authors a similar right to take back their works.
YouTube, perhaps seeking to avoid copyright infringement issues that landed it in a lawsuit with Viacom (which Google ultimately won, though Viacom is seeking an appeal), makes it a point that it works with many different copyright holders from the media industry.
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And, it will require sorting out copyright rights for intricate chains of derivative works.
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Our nation's copyright laws were enacted to protect original works.
Omega sued Costco for selling its watches for prices below suggested retail, citing a tiny Omega logo on the goods that it said gave it the copyright holders power to control how creative works are distributed.
The standard argument for copyright is to incentivize the creation of new works, but academic authors are paid by their respective institutions to produce research and distribute it to the world.
"What this case points out is that the copyright statutes were written in an era when works of authorship were only available in tangible form, " said Jonathan Handel, an entertainment attorney at TroyGould.
Because the first sale doctrine affirmatively protects owners of lawfully purchased works by limiting the ability of a copyright holder to impede their downstream actions.
And the association often works directly with the software giant to investigate copyright violations.
Without strong copyright laws and treaties to protect computer programs as literary works a controversial development only 15 years ago Bill Gates might have a lot less market power now.
The Tenth Circuit, however, pointed out that the URAA was fashioned as an example to other countries similarly grappling with the scope of copyright restoration and whether to require royalty payments and restrict derivative works.
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Shuster's heirs had argued that the copyright agreements could be cancelled under provisions that allowed the creators of works made before 1978 a mechanism to reclaim their rights.
Copyright protection is needed partly to cover the costs of creating and distributing works in physical form.
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The law removes certain works from the realm of First Amendment free speech, but all copyright law does that.
Copyright grants extraordinary powers to an owner, including the right to prevent protected works from being sold or even given away, far more protection than trademark law.
Congress acted to implement an international treaty that it was told would protect U.S. copyright owners who were losing literally billions of dollars a year on bootleg copies of their works.
In its absence, to comply with U.S. copyright law you would have to keep track, in perpetuity, of all foreign-sourced works in order to avoid inadvertently selling, lending, gifting, donating, or otherwise distributing them without permission from the copyright holder.
As for computer-generated works, they have been around for more than a half-century generating copyright issues for just as long.
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