Property is any physical or virtual entity that is owned by an individual or jointly by a group of individuals. An owner of property has the right to consume, sell, rent, mortgage, transfer and exchange his or her property. Important widely-recognized types of property include real property (land), personal property (other physical possessions), and intellectual property (rights over artistic creations, inventions, etc.), although the latter is not always as widely recognized or enforced. A title, or a right of ownership, is associated with property that establishes the relation between the goods/services and other individuals or groups, assuring the owner the right to dispense with the property in a manner he or she sees fit. [From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
What do all of these famous inventions have in common: air conditioning, airbags, bandages, barbed wire, blow dryers, can openers, cement, chewing gum, computers, credit cards, doughnuts, jeans, microwave ovens, paper towels, Play-Doh, Post-it Notes, potato chips, roller coasters, safety pins, Scotch tape, skateboards, staplers, straws, sunscreen, typewriters, Viagra, zippers?
What is a Copyright?
Copyright is a form of legal protection provided by the laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship” fixed in a tangible form of expression. The protection is available to both published and unpublished works. This guide provides answers to the most frequent copyright questions and explains the implications of not registering one. You can protect your original works from the competition, including website content, programming code, literary works, music, photos and more.
If you’ve taken the necessary steps to register your copyrighted works, you inevitably will have an opportunity to royalties off of them. To take advantage of the opportunity, you will need to be familiar with copyright license agreements.
There is a growing number of scholars questioning how to align the First Amendment’s rule that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech….” with intellectual property law that often does, in fact, abridge freedoms of speech. I’m in the middle of reading an entire book on the subject — which I’ll be reviewing here shortly. And, just recently, we saw a court (for the first time) note that parts of copyright law were unconstitutional due to the First Amendment. Law professor Peter Friedman points us to the latest of many recent treatises on the subject, by Christina Bohannan, entitled Copyright Harm and the First Amendment, which questions why copyright law does not require any showing of “harm” to get around the First Amendment issue.
Former state Rep. Jack Hoogendyk, executive director of Citizens Voice for Property Owners, is to be the featured speaker Thursday, April 16, at the Midland County Republican Party’s 5:30 p.m. meeting at Pizza Sam’s party room, 102 W. Main St.
