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Key Concept
Copyright – automatic rights given to the original creator of a work that gives them the exclusive rights on how it is used and reused
Copyright issues in the digital world can get complicated and confusing. Digital tools make it easy for anyone to take other’s work and claim it as their own, usually with no repercussions. Being a good digital citizen means understanding why this is ethically wrong, and what you can do to avoid such circumstances. When composing multi-modal works or publishing on the web, it’s important to understand terms such as copyright, Creative Commons, public domain, and fair use. Many believe that any image on the internet is free to share and reuse, but that’s not the case. In this chapter, we’ll look at terms related to copyright and how they might affect us in our writing.
What is Copyright?
Copyright is an intellectual property law, and a protection automatically applied to any original work of authorship. It says you are the exclusive owner and have the exclusive rights to your work. Overall, it limits the ways that people can use your work, and requires them to get permission when using your work outside of the scope of fair use. Copyright lasts for the duration of the author’s life plus 70 years. If you wrote something today, in 2019, passed away in 2090, then your work would have copyright protecting it until 2160!
What is Fair Use?
While all work automatically has copyright applied to it, only allowing people to use your work if you give them permission, fair use actually grants them that permission if they use it under certain circumstances. There are typically four factors associated with this:
- Intention of the work
- Nature of the work
- Portion of the original work used
- Market impact of such use
In other words, if you are using someone’s copyrighted work, you must use a minimal amount and for a new purpose. This, typically, is called remixing: where you are using someone’s work, reworking it, and using it in a different way. This is why memes can exist. They are creating new meaning with old work, typically photographs.
What is the Public Domain?
Work that is in the Public Domain is not protected by copyright law. This work, then, is free to use and doesn’t require permission from the copyright owner. Typically, works go into the public domain after the original copyright on a work expires: 70 years after the death of its author. However, work can also go into the public domain if it is:
- Produced by the U.S. federal government
- Not in a fixed tangible form (speech, lecture, improv)
- Doesn’t have sufficient originality
When you come across historical plays, such as Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, posted online for free, this is because they are part of the public domain. In fact, there are large web-based projects out there dedicated to curating old works in the public domain, such as Project Gutenberg.
What is Creative Commons?
Many creators find copyright laws constrictive, as the “a