Copyrights are rights to copy, distribute, display and perform creative works. They are one of the basic forms of intellectual property.This text discusses copyright law as it applies in the United States. This concise presentation necessarily omits a number of important provisions of a very complex area of law.

Do copyright laws directly cause people to create works they otherwise wouldn't create? Do those laws directly put substantial amounts of money into authors' pockets? Does culture depend on copyright? Are copyright laws a key driver of competitiveness and of the knowledge economy? These are the key questions William Patry addresses in How to Fix Copyright. We all share the goals of increasing creative works, ensuring authors can make a decent living, furthering culture and competi...

Today's copyright wars can seem unprecedented. Sparked by the digital revolution that has made copyright—and its violation—a part of everyday life, fights over intellectual property have pitted creators, Hollywood, and governments against consumers, pirates, Silicon Valley, and open-access advocates. But while the digital generation can be forgiven for thinking the dispute between, for example, the publishing industry and Google is completely new, the copyright wars in fact stretch back th...

In the summer of 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada issued rulings on five copyright cases in a single day. The cases represent a seismic shift in Canadian copyright law, with the Court providing an unequivocal affirmation that copyright exceptions such as fair dealing should be treated as users’ rights, while emphasizing the need for a technology neutral approach to copyright law. The Court’s decisions, which were quickly dubbed the “copyright pentalogy,” included no fees for song previews...

A Patent is an official paper guaranteeing an inventor and his heirs, exclusive rights over an invention, process, idea, etc., for a given length of time. Learn how to protect your intellectual property, you invention or idea, with a Patent. This step-by-step instruction guide is set up in a concise, readable, easy to understand format. If you are thinking of Doing-It- Yourself or getting outside help, you need to know the process, so your interests are protected. Also included with this i...

Intellectual property rights and their overlaps are considered in light of rights purposes, relying on the concept of a balance of rights as the measuring rod for assessment of the consequences resulting from the exercise of overlapping rights. Identifying the complex interface between different types of intellectual property rights, this book discusses the use of these rights and their effect on a diverse group of stakeholders, from individual users of e-books to large corporations operat...

Patent assertion entities (commonly known as 'patent trolls') hurt competition and innovation. This book, the first to analyze the most salient issues related to patent assertion entities around the world, integrates economic theory with economic and legal reality to examine how the entities function and their impact on competition. It also offers legal and policy solutions that might be used to combat them. Edited by D. Daniel Sokol, the volume collects chapters from an array of leading s...

Copyright laws, along with other Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), constitute the legal foundation for the "global knowledge-based economy" and copyright law now plays an increasingly important role in the creation of business fortunes, the access to and dissemination of knowledge, and human development in general.This book examines major problems in the current IPR regime, particularly the copyright regime, in the context of digitization, knowledge economy, and globalization. T...

The perfect distillation of everything you need to know about copyright law.Covering everything from copyright's early history to the protection of cutting-edge software, Copyright Master is a concise, practical guide through the labyrinth of licensing and intellectual property.Whether by explaining the Creative Commons system, providing a useful guide to takedown notices, or examining the process for licensing orphan works, Copyright Master forms an ideal...

The public domain—the body of creative works not entitled to copyright protection—is the world's greatest intellectual resource. Unfortunately, it can be extraordinarily hard to determine whether a work (or part of a work) is in the public domain.The first book of its kind, Copyright and the Public Domain brings much‐needed clarity to the question of what is protected by copyright and what is not. In plain language, it explains how and why works of authorship enter...

Owning Ideas is a comprehensive account of the emergence of the concept of intellectual property in the United States during the long nineteenth century. In the modern information era, intellectual property has become a central economic and cultural phenomenon, and an important lever for allocating wealth and power. This book uncovers the intellectual origins of this modern concept of private property in ideas through a close study of its emergence within the two most important areas of th...

Designs have underpinned much of the technological and industrial innovation of recent years. They have become increasingly valuable within the portfolio of intellectual property rights. Indeed, given the extent to which economic growth is driven by these advancements and the ever-increasing financial benefits of holding exclusive exploitation rights for the most significant designs, the importance of protecting such designs cannot be understated. International Design Protection is an inte...