Stephanie Majors's List: Copyright

• What's Digital Law?
• Digital Law relates to crimes of stealing or causing damage to other people’s work, identity, or digital property.
• • Stealing someone's identity is called identity theft. (Covered in Section #7, Digital Security.)
   
  • Stealing someone's digital property can be intellectual property theft, digital piracy, or plagiarism.
   
  • Causing damage to others would be crimes such as hacking or creating and sending viruses.

• Copyright:  Is the law that protects the rights held by the creator, developer, or author over their own original work. These works may consist of electronically stored words, photograph, music, work of visual art, or performance art and thereby includes digital property.

   

  Copyright Infringement (Violation):  Is when a person violates a copyright by either reproducing, adapting, publicly distributing, performing, or displaying a work without permission from the creator.

   

   

  Copyright law applies whether or not the material has a copyright notice symbol ©, which means it's been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. (Copyright differs from Patents, which protect people's inventions, and from Trademarks ®, which protect brand names.)

   

  Two Types of Copyright Infringement:

   
   
  1. Digital Piracy:  Unauthorized reproducing (copying) and distributing (sharing) of digitized property: electronic files and audio-visual media. Obtaining copies of songs, computer software, videos games, and movies without paying for them is all considered Digital Piracy.
   
  2. Plagiarism: The copyright violation of using printed words, photos, or illustrations in your own product without permission - where one person copies another's work and uses it as their own. (More on Plagiarism is covered in topic #7: Digital Rights and Responsibilities.)

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• Copyright
• Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution, usually for a limited time, with the intention of enabling the creator of intellectual wealth (e.g. the photographer of a photograph or the author of a book) to receive compensation for their work and be able to financially support themselves.
• Copyright is a form of intellectual property (as patents, trademarks and trade secrets are), applicable to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete.^[
• Copyright initially was conceived as a way for government to restrict printing; the contemporary intent of copyright is to promote the creation of new works by giving authors control of and profit from them.
• Copyright may apply to a wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms, or "works".
• Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed.^[
• Typically, a work must meet minimal standards of originality in order to qualify for copyright, and the copyright expires after a set period of time (some jurisdictions may allow this to be extended).

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• A copyright is a legal term that refers to the author of an original piece of work being the sole owner of that work, which gives that person the right to re-publish or alter that work however they like.
• o what exactly is a copyright? A copyright is a form of protection grounded in the US constitution and granted by law for original work of authorship, fixed in a tangible medium of expression. So what does all that mean exactly? Basically it means if you can create it then you have the right to protect it and legally claim it as your own.