The Importance of Royalty Fees For clarity, we’ll quickly define the meaning of royalty fees. A royalty payment system is an agreement wherein, rather than buying the copyright to a work, or even buying the publishing rights outright, the licensee, or buyer, will...

Youtube and Copyright Law If you go on Youtube and look up any mainstream musician you can think of, you’re probably going to find hundreds of videos posted by fans, providing not only their popular, studio released music, but also, rare B-sides, live performances,...

Satire: What can I get away with? You’ve probably heard all three of these words; satire, parody, and spoof. Here we’ll get into satire, and furthermore, how it pertains to copyright law. (...)

Licensing, Merchandising, and Distribution Rights There can be some confusion regarding who exactly owns a copyrighted intellectual property sometimes. For example, if you grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, you would probably see the comic strip...

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. (...)