What is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)? In October of 1998, two treaties of the WIPO, or World Intellectual Property Organization, were implemented into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. (...)

The Effectiveness of By-Mail Copyright The traditional, and honestly, the most effective way to register a copyright and make sure that it actually holds up in a court of law, is to go through a notary public. (...)

What’s the Difference between Homage and Plagiarism? In general, we probably think “derivative works are a form of plagiarism”, or we might think “derivative works are just fine”, but really, the water can get kind of cloudy. (...)

How Legal is File Sharing? We all remember when Napster was shut down for allowing users to trade thousands of illegal files a day. At one point, the problem with Napster actually got so bad that, at several college campuses, a whopping eighty percent of internet use...

What Derivative Works are Okay? In copyright law, there are a lot of different categories for derivative works. There is no one definition or law that binds them all, and oftentimes, even once a derivative work has been appropriately classified, it’s still up to...

The Importance of Protecting your Intellectual Property If you are authoring anything at all right now… be it a screenplay, some original music, a piece of software, or anything else that falls under abstract principles, it is your intellectual property. (...)

Releasing Work under a Creative Commons License Many artists are beginning to release music and other works directly into the Creative Commons. This is being done, partly, as a way to give back to their fans, which is more than welcome after the messiness and ethical...

How to Obtain a Poor Man’s Copyright In discussions regarding copyright and intellectual property, you may have heard of the so-called Poor Man’s Copyright. The method known as the poor man’s copyright is not actually recommended by either the US or UK courts,...

How are US Intellectual Property Laws Unique? It’s probably fair to say that throughout most of the civilized world, copyright laws are kind of built on the same skeleton, more or less. The author or owner of a given work has certain exclusive rights with regards...

What is the Public Domain? When people refer to the “public domain”, they are referring to an area of intellectual property, or abstract properties, that do not fall into the ownership of any individual person or company. (...)

The Rise and Fall of Napster So who remembers Napster? It would probably be fair to say that all of this recent debate over file sharing and copyright law as it pertains to the internet all started with Napster. (...)

How do you go about Determining Ownership of a Copyright? It’s not always easy to figure out who owns a copyright. There have been cases where filmmakers were forced to remove music from a movie because, while they did get permission from the musician, it turned...

Copyright and Privacy: Photography and the Law Believe it or not, you can actually get in some pretty deep trouble just for taking a few innocent photographs. Now, nine times out of ten, you can basically photograph anything you like and not have to worry about it,...

What can I do with Free Content? Free content differs from open content in a number of ways. By definition, free content is any kind of abstract property, artwork, music, fictional characters, etcetera, wherein no legal restrictions are placed on what an individual...