What in the heck is a dissertation on copyrights doing in the ATM FAQ? Well, unfortunately this topic has come up many times on the list. Most often, this topic is raised when discussing Kalmbach's ownership of the copyrights on Telescope Making Magazine. (More on that later.) While I am not a lawyer, I do earn my living thanks to the copyright law (I'm a professional writer). So, I will do my best to explain this very complicated law. This is not legal advice or counsel, please see a lawyer for such.
A very well-written, comprehensive, FAQ, on copyrights is available at ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/law/copyright/faq/. It is available in six parts. Part 1 is basically an introduction and overview, the real meat starts in Part 2. It does not include recent changes to the law as defined by the World Intellectual Property Organization and subsequent US and international laws. However, it is still quite applicable as the new treaty basically extends the old one to new applications. If you are really interested in this subject, I would suggest reading that FAQ.
A copyright is a legal designation that gives the authors of a piece of intellectual property some exclusive rights to their work. Copyrights protect actual instances of a work (its format on paper, the words it uses, the look and feel, etc.). Copyrights do not apply to ideas, algorithms, factual information, or pre-existing material included in the author's work.
Copyrights are defined by the Berne Convention, the WIPO, and in the US by the Consitution and subsequent laws. Generally, copyright protection is universal across national boundaries as most nations have signed the appropriate convention treaties and enacted those treaties as law.
There are actually seven different rights that comprise copyrights, at least as defined in the U.S. These are:
How does something become copyrighted?
According to international law, anything you originally write or create is automatically copyrighted. This includes emails you write, web pages you create, books or articles you write, and so forth. You do not need to mark your works in any way for them to become copyrighted. To protect a copyright, you need to be able to prove that you are the originator of the work. One easy way to do this is to mark your work so that everyone will know that it is copyrighted. Then, conceivably, you would produce an example in court to show that yours is the original work.
To mark something as copyrighted, you should include the © symbol, the date the work was first published, and your name. Such as:
© 1998 John DoeA major caveat to the above involves work for hire. For example, I work for a publisher who pays me a salary to create training manuals. I personally do not own the copyright on any portion of those manuals, the company I work for does. The same is true with any materials produced under a work for hire arrangement.
Most copyrights last for 50 years after the death of the author. If two or more authors create a work, the copyright lasts 50 years after the death of the last-living author. In some other cases, copyrights last longer. See the copyright FAQ mentioned above or a laywer for more information.
How do I mark something as not copyrighted?
The opposite of a copyrighted work is on that is in the "public domain." A public domain work may be used, modified, distributed, attributed, or anything else by anyone including the original creator. Works can become public domain if any of the following are true:
Sometimes you'll see a program on the network accompanied by a statement like "This program is public domain. It may be freely distributed, but you may not charge more for it than the cost of the media." Statements like these are contradictory. If the program is public domain, you can do whatever you want with it, including charging whatever you wantAs described above, you can't place any restrictions on a public domain work because you don't own it, the "public" does.
Typically, you can use small portions of a copyrighted work without permission provided you are doing so for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. According to the US Copyright Office, "The distinction between 'fair use' and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."
Fair use is a sticky and complicated part of the law and is often the source of infringemet lawsuits. See part 2 of the copyright FAQ for more information and some specific examples of what has been upheld in court cases as "fair use."
A commonly discussed issue on the list has been obtaining the out-of-print Telescope Making Magazine. Telescope Making Magazine was originally published by AstroMedia Corp. until that company was bought out by Kalmbach Publishing (the publishers of Astronomy Magazine). Kalmbach now owns the copyrights to that magazine. The "creator" of the work still lives, in this case the Kalmbach Publishing company, so the 50 year life-span of a copyright has not yet begun to tick.
At the beginning of 1999, Kalmbach reached an agreement with the Amateur Telescope Makers' Association, the publishers of the ATM Journal to allow the ATMJ to reprint selected TM articles. The ATMJ will be allowed to reprint one TM article per issues of ATMJ (a quarterly). Kalmbach does not have other stated plans to re-publish the magazine in any form (nor can you do so legally).