What’s up with iTunes? Even today, some people aren’t entirely clear on the legality of iTunes and other MP3 player programs. It basically comes down to this: If you buy the MP3’s in your iTunes library, it is one hundred percent legal. (...)

Knowing Enough about Intellectual Property Law to not Lose a Lawsuit Whatever you do for a living, if you create something original, in any small way, you should know the basics of intellectual property law. (...)

Collaboration and Ownership: The Importance of Legally Binding Documents If you are working on a collaborative project with another creator or artist, you’d probably be best advised to talk some things over with them before really investing yourself into the work. (...)

Fan Fiction and other Fan Created Works We’ve probably all heard the term “fan-fiction”, or “fan fic” and most of us know exactly what the term means: Fiction written by the admirers of a copyrighted intellectual property. (...)

What is a Copyleft? You’ve probably heard the term “copyleft” once or twice. It’s kind of a play on words, rather than official law that’s on the books somewhere. Copylefting is when the owner of a copyright actually uses copyright laws to remove all...

How the Pirate’s Bay Manages to Stay in Business A BitTorrent is defined as a peer to peer file sharing protocol, and is used to distribute large amounts of data without actually having to store information online permanently. (...)

Bearshare and other Peer to Peer Services Until early 2006, Bearshare made a name for itself as a sort of a second coming of the original Napster. In 2006, the people who owned and operated Bearshare agreed to pay a huge settlement to the RIAA, forcing the company to...

Who has the Publication Rights? If there was ever an area of copyright law that gets murky and confusing, it’s probably in publication rights. What publication rights literally means is that the holder of those rights is allowed to, well, publish. (...)

How does the Law Pertain to Trading MP3’s? For a period of time in the early twenty first century and late 1990’s, MP3’s had a sort of black mark of piracy about them. This was owed mainly to Napster, the program which allowed users to freely trade MP3’s,...

Buying Intellectual Property There are a lot of different ways of selling or buying intellectual property, actually. Outright Purchase For the longest time, the only way an artist could get published was basically to forfeit any and all of their ownership rights on...

Retaining Creator Ownership Believe it or not, the vast majority of art and entertainment, and even most software, in the United States is not owned by the original creator or author. As a general rule, ever since companies in the United States first started...

Copyright Law and Video Sharing Sites We all know about Youtube and Google video, of course, and we all know that you can go on those sites and find tons of copyright infringing copies of copyright protected content. (...)

How do UK Intellectual Property Laws Differ from US Laws? In many areas, the United States and the United Kingdom are pretty similar when it comes to intellectual property laws, copyrights, the public domain, and so on. (...)

What do Patent Lawyers do? A patent attorney, or patent lawyer, well, you can probably guess what they do, which is that they are attorneys at law with specialized qualifications regarding clients wishing to obtain or protect patents. (...)