Skip to Main Content

Copyright & Fair Use

COPYRIGHT BASICS

Copyright is the section of US law that protects the rights of creators to the material that they create. In order to qualify for copyright protection, the work must be original, creative, and fixed in a tangible form. Books, movies, photographs, research, and architecture all qualify for copyright protection.

According to 17 U.S.C. § 106, the copyright owner of a work has the exclusive right to (or permit others to):

  • Reproduce the copyrighted work.
  • Prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work (such as film adaptations, musicals, and translations).
  • Distribute copies of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.
  • Perform the copyrighted work in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works.
  • Display publicly the copyrighted work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
  • Broadcast the copyrighted work, in the case of sound recordings.

Note that the law refers to the copyright owner rather than the author. While authors own the copyright to a work at its creation, in many publication contracts the author surrenders their copyright ownership to the publisher.

For more detailed information you can read the entirety of Title 17 at the US Copyright Office’s website.

In the United States federal law protects original works, published or not published, from the moment they are in a fixed format regardless of whether they include a copyright notice. A song is protected as soon as it’s recorded, a photo as soon as it’s taken, a novel as soon as it’s written.

Creators do not need to register their work with the US Copyright office for their work to be protected, but doing so makes it easier to enforce copyright disputes in court.

The following are not protected by US copyright law:

  • Items in the "public domain," which includes works where the copyright has lapsed or the creator waived protections.
  • Titles, names, slogans, short phrases. However, these are often still legally protected – by trademark instead of copyright.
  • Ideas, procedures, theories, methods, principles, concepts, systems, data, facts (although the expression of these ideas may be copyrighted)
  • Works lacking originality (e.g., calendars, tape measures, rulers)
  • Any work created by a US government employee or officer is in the public domain as part of their official work. Works by freelancers, contractors, or other nations' governments may still be protected.

How long copyright lasts depends on a lot of factors. The law has undergone changes and revisions over the years and depending on when and how a work was created the copyright protection will expire at different times.

Generally any work published 95 years ago (currently 1928) will lose copyright protection and enter the public domain, but there are all kinds of other rules applying to works published after 1977.

Cornell University Library keeps an exhaustive list of the conditions under which copyrighted works will enter the public domain. Reference that list for more exact times and reasons a work will lose copyright protection.