Thursday, July 12, 2012

Some Internet Copyright Laws and Some Things to Know

Some Internet Copyright Laws and Some Things to Know.

Welcome back to LilacsNDreams, and happy to have you visiting. Todays topic is something that is an ongoing issue. Some have problems with it, some have not experienced any issues, and some are experiencing issues all the time. I once had an issue with my blog posts being copied by someone with wordpress. I don't mind the copying as long as I know about it, and most of all am given the credit for it too. Something we all try for is to make sure we get the credit for anything of ours that is seen on this big old internet. 

Through a little research I found that the corrected form of copyright notice is "Copyright or ©, Date, by Author/Owner". Everything that is from April 1, 1989 is copyrighted by the owner/author whether it has a notice of it, or not. All internet users should assume the work is copyrighted unless otherwise specified by the author. "I grant this to the public domain" Anybody can copy, take, or use without giving credit to the owner IF this has been announced. You can also contact the author, and be granted permission of use too. The Copyright Law is Civil Law. 

You can go to many places, research the internet for Copyright Laws, and read many things about this issue. Many times you will see the same thing being repeated. Some things will be said again in different ways with different references. Doesn't hurt to hear some of the repeats for us to understand some of it. 

Copyright protects the original works of authorship which include literacy, musical, dramatic, and artistic works like poetry, novels, movies, computer software, architecture, and songs. Copyright Does NOT protect facts, systems, ideas, or some methods of operations. Although it might protect the ways these things can be expressed. 

Names are NOT protected by Copyright Law. Although some names may be protected by trademark law. Does not protect titles, slogans, names, and short phrases. In some cases again they may be protected as trademarks. Some of this came from different topics at http://www.copyright.gov 

Copyrights protect the creative expressions that have been reduced to a tangible form such as books, pieces of recorded music, computer programs, screen plays, photographs, paintings, motion pictures. 

Trademarks protect brand names, literally marking items in trade. The idea behind the trademark is to protect the consumer by giving them some confidence that items branded with a certain mark are authentic, and come from where they purpote to come from.

Patent protects innovation. While you cannot copyright an idea, you can patent one. www.benedict.com   

Copyrighted works on the internet include software, news stories, screenplays, novels, pictures, graphics, usenet messages, and even email. In fact, the frightening reality is that almost everything on the internet is protected by copyright laws. 

At one time for afforded copyright protection you had to put the world on notice by attaching a copyright notice to the work. This is no longer the case, but it is still to attach a copyright notice with copyrighted work in order to be eligible for certain types of damages. 

4 Elements That Are Needed: The term of copyright or the copyright symbol - The year of copyright - Name of the copyright holder - and use the phrase "All Rights Reserved"

Foreign country copyrights can be a little bit different than we have here in the United States too. Like they use the symbol, and we can use the word copyright in lieu of the symbol. 

Please keep in mind that the copyright may not always be the author, or creator of the work. Companies should be considered, their employees working for them, and etc. 

So, when we are using pictures, or showing pictures that came from some where else we need to remember to give the proper credit of where we got those pictures from. Kind of like pinning with Pinterest making sure the proper credit is given, or when we show things with our blogs or websites we need to give the proper credit also. 

Hope this little tidbit was helpful to some of you. If you Google, or Bing some of this you can get more information as well. There is a lot out there. Thanks so much for sharing your time with LilacsNDreams. Come back to visit again soon. 

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