Happy Birthday, U.S. Copyright

In today's issue (May 31, 2011) of the Roanoke Times, I noticed an interesting tidbit in the Odds & Ends section.  According to this page, George Washington signed into law the first U.S. Copyright Act on May 31, 1790.  Of course, I verified this through Wikipedia, and then got to thinking about how copyright affects students, researchers, faculty, and many other components at a large research university.  Much has changed within U.S. copyright law since 1790, especially in the wake of the digitization of information!  Since 1790, U.S. copyright law has gone through several iterations, the most recent of which created the Copyright Act of 1976.  Recent updates to this Act have included the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the Teaching, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH), all of which affect instructors, students, and researchers at a large university like Virginia Tech.

At University Libraries, we get regular questions about copyright, so I thought today would be a good day to go over a few copyright basics and point you to some library resources that may help you understand everyone's rights a little bit better.

Copyright Basics

• Copyright gives the owner of a copyright six exclusive rights.  You can read about those here, on the website for the United States Copyright Office
• Copyright, for most works, now lasts for the lifetime of the author + 70 years.  They then pass into the public domain.  Use this chart from Lolly Gasaway to help you figure out when that might be for a particular work!  
• Government documents are completely within the public domain--they are not under copyright protection
• Copyright protection begins the moment that the work exists--no one needs to register anything for copyright protection
• Several categories of material (such as ideas, names, methods, procedures, etc.) cannot be protected under copyright
• Copyright limitations do exist...

Copyright Limitations

As people at a large research university, we are all probably aware (at least vaguely) of various limitations to copyright, and how that might benefit us.  A few of these limitations include:

• Fair Use
• The TEACH Act
• First Sale Doctrine (the piece of copyright law allowing libraries to lend books!)
• Personal Copies

Students and faculty will often use the principle of Fair Use or rely on the TEACH Act to justify using copyrighted material.  Click on the links above and read more about each of these limitations to read about what these really entail.

Here at University Libraries, we have a lot of valuable resources related to helping you understand your rights within copyright law.  We have an entire page devoted to copyright:  http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/copyright/.  On this page, we focus on helping you understand what you can and can't do, and also how you can keep the copyright to your own work, if you are publishing an article or other resource with a publisher!  One of my favorite tools on this page include the Fair Use Analyzer, a form designed to assist you deciding whether or not your use of copyrighted material is "fair" or not.  Similarly, our pages tailored to needs of Instructors and Scholars/Researchers really help different users figure out how copyright law and protection applies to them.

As always, don't hesitate to let us know if you have any questions about what may or may not be legal (or ethical).  And, Happy Birthday, U.S. Copyright!