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COPYRIGHT RESOURCES

Overview of US Copyright Law

K-12 COPYRIGHT LAWS: PRIMER FOR TEACHERS
Teachers and Administrators Need To Know what is legal to do in the Classroom.

Must see 1890's The Original Philadelphia Film Pirates which includes Thomas Edison.

COPYRIGHT ART LAW
VARA - The Visual Artists Rights Act LAW The Statute 17 USC section 106A Law protectin certain rights of the artist's works.

HOW TO PROTECT ONLINE ART
Photographer Requests Takedowns from Google and Yahoo Sample Letters

How do you protect your pictures and graphics? The answer is not popular. The answer is, "you don't."
There are JavaScript techniques to disable the right click; there are masking techniques whereby another, transparent image is superimposed over the one you wish to protect; there are mouseover and mouseout techniques that flip the image to something else when the mouse is over it, or change the page completely as the mouse encroaches; there are a variety of other coding techniques that people have come up with to prevent downloads. None of these techniques works.
The reason is simple. When the browser is going to take you to a page, it makes a request of the website's server, which responds by sending down all the files associated with the requested page. The browser puts these into its cache directory and starts to assemble them for display.
Regardless of the methods used to make capture off the displayed page more difficult, the individual files remain in the cache until they are purged. This purging could happen after some number of days, at some specified time or when some particular event, such as closing the browser, occurs. This is a user controlled option. Any pilferer worth their salt knows how to control the cache, where to find it, how to locate any picture or graphics files they are after and how to copy them out. If the page can be displayed, they images can be saved. To make it as hard as possible for somebody else to use your work, consider building a complex Flash or LiveMotion file, or something similar, that contains your identification information along with the pictures. This will help to stop all but the most hardened, and for them, it might just be too much work to be worth it.

AN ONLINE COMIC BOOK ON COPYRIGHT LAW
Duke University Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has published a comic book to teach users copyright law basics, including the distinctions between fair use and copyright infringement. The book's format and content are especially relevant to college students who are using and creating multimedia works. TALES FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: BOUND BY LAW? can be downloaded for free.

COPYRIGHT WIZARD

PLAGIARISM CATCHING DIGITAL CHEATERS

Trademark law is supposed to ensure that consumers can trust that the goods and services they buy come from the sources they expect, e.g., that the Pepsi you just bought really was manufactured by Pepsi. That helps consumers, because it gives mark-owners an incentive to maintain the expected level of quality. And it helps mark-owners, because they can build customer loyalty and good will.

COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION PROCEDURES

COPYRIGHT RESOURCES

GUIDELINES FOR MUSIC COPYRIGHT

 

 

Guidelines have been developed and approved by the Music Publishers' Association of the United States, Inc., the National Music Publishers' Association, Inc., the Music Teachers National Association, the Music Educators National Conference, the National Association of Schools of Music, and the Ad Hoc Committee on Copyright Law Revision.

Indemnification Clauses

Many indemnification clauses are triggered by warranty clauses - promises you make to the publisher. It is cleaner to keep a contractual distance from anything that you can't control. Suggest you make warranties only "to the writer's knowledge." Warranty clauses typically cover a range of conditions - copyright infringement, infringing any third party's rights (including those publicity and privacy), or writing something that would be libelous. Sometimes, editors will add things without telling the author. What happens when an editor makes up a quote out of nothing? If that quote puts the source in a bad light, you could be talking about a law suit. Or what if someone at the publication adds some "information" that is somehow judged to be an infringement of a company's intellectual property? It's hard to imagine a court would agree to an indemnification predicated on something that writer hadn't written.