Important: This article contains opinions and information about copyright law. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer and have not been a lawyer in any past life that I am aware of. If you have specific questions about copyright law you should contact
appropriate legal resources.People work hard to develop graphics, write stories and articles, design web sites and build software, among other things. They are sometimes paid for their efforts, sometimes not. In any event, in
United States (and in most of
world) anything that you create or write is automatically protected by copyright.
You do not generally need to register your works with
copyright office in order for them to be protected. Registration simply serves as added insurance - it gives you
ability to prove that you wrote or created
item on a specific date and formally establishes you as
copyright owner.
The person or company (if you create
work for a company it belongs to
company) owns
rights to publish
material. These rights do not stop no matter how many times
material is illegally copied or if
copyright holder gives you a copy. He still owns
copyright unless he signs it over to someone else.
The point is that taking someone's images, writings, songs (MP3's included), videos or anything else is violating
law and
person's rights. In fact, it is stealing and, if proven,
violator can be held liable for damages.
So what do you do when you see that cool graphic or sound file on
internet and you want a copy? Well, you can write to
copyright owner and ask permission to use it or to make a copy (always get written permission - anything not in writing is difficult to prove in a court of law). Getting permission is not difficult and it is rewarding to create a web site or other work knowing that everything is totally legal.
I've found that most artists and writers on
internet are completely willing to allow their work to be copied as long as they get credit and a link back to their site. Occasionally I've found an exception - an author or artist who does not want to allow casual copying. In this case
best thing to do is to follow
wishes of
copyright owner - don't copy
material.
A good rule of thumb about using materials gleaned from
internet is: if you have any doubts about being able to make copies, don't use it. There are way too many good public domain sites for clipart, music and video for there to be any excuse for illegally using copyrighted material on your site.
One of
more interesting copyright violations occurred between
owner of Star Trek (Viacom) and every non-sanctioned Star Trek site on
web. Viacom decided that it didn't agree with people using Star Trek photos, graphics, stories and other materials as it owned
copyrights. So it send out a letter to every site it could find telling them to cease desist. They succeeded in alienating most of
Star Trek fans in
world and in angering just about everyone ... and most of
site still seem to be operating. Yet, legally, Viacom is correct ... they do own
copyrights. But was it a good move to act
way that they did? I don't think so, as Star Trek has a huge fan following and allowing
fans to create literally thousands of web sites is probably
best advertising that Viacom could have asked for.