4. Copyright Part I: Five Principles of Copyright When Planning to Share | Presentation

Introduction

Suppose you own a bicycle, or other very useful, mainstream item which is common for your audience to own (e.g., a snow shovel, public transit pass, physics textbook, gaming console, etc.).

[interactive activity] Please raise your hand if you own a bicycle. [Hawa raises hand.] Ok, great. [ok to put hands down but ask students for their names.] If Javier wants to borrow Hawa’s bicycle, can he? [discussion] No, he needs to ask. And if Hawa does not respond, can he borrow it? [discussion] If Hawa says he can borrow it on Tuesday from 11:00-12:00, does that mean he can also use it on Wednesday from 9:00-10:00, or for the rest of the year? If he has permission to use it to get to class can he also use it in a competitive bike race? Can he paint it a different color? Since Hawa gave permission to Javier, does that mean Max can also use Hawa’s bicycle? No, of course not.

Copyright is a lot like this bicycle example. In the same way that someone owns even an unlocked, unaccompanied bicycle, someone likewise owns the digital artifact you found freely on the web, the picture published in a book you own, the architectural model you saw in Architecture Studio, or the cool diagram you saw on a conference poster. In the same way as borrowing a bicycle, you must obtain some sort of permission to use in-copyright works when those rights don’t belong to you.

When teaching requires research and publication, we often want to integrate the actual materials (not just citable ideas) into our own work. These are materials that someone else made. Do you have any examples from your own life/work/studies when you wanted to do this? Our work is often better when we draw on others’ expertise and what they have made. Well, this poses a problem, doesn’t it? We WANT to draw on a lot of sources that we didn’t create.

Two Dilemmas When Creating With Sharing in Mind

There are two questions here: 1) how to use others’ work legally and ethically, and 2) making your work useful for others who may need to customize or adapt it to fit their use.

While the following idea may be controversial, there is some expectation (a “should” if you will) that if we expect others to share in a certain way, that we too should be willing to do the same. The following information may help you to get there.

Part I: Five Things Everyone Should Know about Copyright

Let’s step back to look at some relevant underlying principles, not about what we do, but about the legal environment in which we function in the U.S.. We’re going to quickly go through a series of SIX principles that outline what you need to know about copyright. (We’ll cover #6 in the next section.)

Principle 1: Unless otherwise marked, always assume that every artifact’s copyrights are owned by someone. That someone might be YOU. Like a bicycle, unless clearly marked, or you have a highly informed reason to know otherwise. You should always assume that every created thing you see or hear which is somehow preserved or “recorded” (legal experts use the phrase “recorded in a fixed medium”) has copyrights owned by someone. This also includes content you don’t have to pay for that you find on the internet.

This means that unless your employer, sponsor, or work agreement or policy says otherwise, you have complete ownership over your original work! Note that in the U.S. most employers by default assert ownership over their employees’ work created on the job. However, if you are a university student, you own your work (unless you’re an employee or you have a prior arrangement with someone funding your schooling costs). You are a copyright owner!

Works in a fixed medium created by human beings are automatically under copyright. Examples include: a sculpture, a filed saved to your computer or the cloud, a doodle on a piece of scratch paper, or a picture taken with your cell phone.

There are some things that cannot be under copyright. These include:

• Ideas, facts, data, common knowledge
• Narrative, image, song (when there is no record)
• Works clearly donated to the Public Domain
• Published in the US pre-1926*
• Created by U.S. Government employees acting in an official capacity
• Currently, works compiled by a computer such as an AI-generated image are not copyrightable.

*Note: The entry date of works into the Public Domain in the U.S. advances each year. As of Jan 1st 2023, it will be works published pre-1927. On Jan 1, 2024 it will be pre-1928, and so on. For more info, see: https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain.

Principle 3: All published works are destined for freedom from Copyright in the Public Domain, but it takes a long while for them to get there. When copyrighted materials reach a certain age, they “graduate” from Copyright and join the Public Domain and are free from copyright restrictions. (Note that “I found this free online” is not the same as being in the Public Domain.) Original works may also be donated or clearly marked by their maker as donated to the Public Domain (CC0). However, works made by U.S. Federal Employees during their official duties are automatically in the Public Domain in the United States.

So, in summary, works fall into three different categories: (1) works YOU made, whose rights you did not sell or give away, (2) works someone else made, and (3) works in the Public Domain.

Principle 4: Copyrights can be thought of as a creator’s monopoly (in duration and use) over a bundle of different rights. Relevant here are rights to copy, create other versions, publicly display, and distribute your work. These last the author’s lifetime, plus 70 years before graduating to the Public Domain. Unless a work is clearly a “work for hire,” for example, in a written contract, you as the author have a monopoly on these rights.

Principle 5: A creator/author may commoditize, license, or donate parts or the whole bundle of rights. 

As mentioned in principle 4, the “bundle” of rights relevant to us are rights to copy, create other versions (derivatives), publicly display, and distribute the work.

An author may retain, sell, donate, and/or license parts (or the whole bundle) to one party (an exclusive use) or to many parties, for limited times or for all time, within limited geographies or to all geographies, in certain media or in an infinite number of types of media.