Hey, I'm Just Selling This - It's Not Mine

Carl Gustav Jung theories got shifted into the awareness of modern neurology long ago. Still, some Internet companies would be showing symptoms of a suckling archetype. Success in free publishing might become the unlikely common experience, should the primordial behavior be let dominate.

Specifically, the publishing and sharing platforms such as Associated Content or Delicious, becoming sold, have started bringing new terms of use that could trigger word associations.

The publisher to have taken over from the Associated Content, 'just wanting to make things easier', offers a new log in option to require accepting new terms of use. The terms no longer state that content providers are the exclusive owners of their work. Further, the publisher expects to be granted the right to produce derivative works from the content on their platform.

As for awareness again, it is probably enough to look at Wiedmaier's Physiology to get the picture on what 'derivative' might mean. Arthur Vander, James Sherman, and Dorothy Luciano came up with quite a good book on human physiology. It's title is 'Human Physiology. The Mechanisms of Body Function'. Eric Wiedmaier, Hershel Raff, and Kevin Strang came up with 'Vander, Sherman, and Luciano's Human Physiology. The Mechanisms of Body Function'.

There are also the 'Art Notebook to Accompany Vander et al.'s Human Physiology' and the 'Loose Leaf Version of Vander's Human Physiology'. The 'companions' are not revisions. I read a Vander when I studied. Google search in the Wiedmaier shows much the content of the Vander, without inverted commas. This is what 'derivative' might mean.

Another 'opportunity', with the Delicious new owner - they do not claim any ownership to submitted content; they want the right to SELL it. The platform 'does not claim any ownership rights in any such Member Content'. The 'such' does not refer to a clause exclusive of rights. Yet you are expected to grant 'a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, SELL, transfer, publicly display, etc.' your content.

'Hey, I'm just selling this; it's not mine' - Northern District of California jurisdiction have been named by the publisher for the only legal authority here, however you like to travel. Maybe it is just my word association, but selling would be a transfer of ownership rights you have yourself. Otherwise, you do not have any right to transact. I would have another word association. It is the phrase 'a valid contract'. I have parted with the publishers in a spontaneous act of individual sovereignty.

Copyright Law Applies to T-Shirt Designing

When you hire an artist to create a design for you, you own the product designed once the art work is complete but not the copyright to the design- it still remains the artist's property as it is his creativity. An authority must be granted by the artist in writing to claim that the copyright has been transferred as well. The payment you make is for his creativity and effort but this does not mean that the design becomes your property. This does not have to be a long, fancy process, simply something in black and white that states the artist has either transferred the copyright to his design or he shares it with you. If you hire the artist as a contractor, you do not own copyrights until there is an agreement but if the designer is your employee, you automatically own copyrights to his design as an employer.

A copyright is the protection provided to an original, tangible form of work in literature, art, drama, music, architecture, design or research work. It authorizes the owner to claim an infringement in case his work is reproduced, altered, published or broadcasted without his consent. A copyright exists when an idea is put down as an expression on paper or a computer file. It is not necessary to register this copyright except if a lawsuit has to be filed against plagiarism. A registered copy with the United States Copyright Office claims authority of the owner with the date and place of the creation of this work with official stamps. A legal registration provides a public record which makes it easier to prove copyright ownership. This process is much cheaper than the trademark registration and costs around $30.

The symbol ? is also not essential except that it makes it clear that the owner has a registered copyright. Anyone still willing to use your design or composition must obtain the permission of the owner or face consequences at the court.

Anyone who violates the copyrights of an owner is liable of being summoned to the court for infringing the copyright. If the owner already has a registered product, the infringer will pay not only the damages to the sales and loss on profit but also the attorney fee. But if the copyright is not registered, the defendant only pays the damages to sales and loss on profit to the claimant.

The hardest part is finding people who violate your rights especially in the T-shirt industry. As it is a very big industry and many people on small and large scales are engaged in T-shirt printing, it is difficult to know if your design is being copied. Many of these manufacturers have no trademarks and no registrations. That is what makes it hard to track them.

copyright uk provides complete protection for you creative designing, games, song lyrics, legal documents etc. For more info and online copyright registration visit here: copyright.co.uk

Copyright Law - Grasping The Concept of Fair Use

Copyright owners yell protect my rights! Online publishers yell fair use lets me use your copyrighted material! Who is right? The answer is found in the concept of fair use.

Let's assume you've decided to write the next great American novel. You spend two years slaving over it. Two long, hard years of getting the characters and plot just right. Miracle of miracles, the book gets picked up by a big publisher and it becomes a hit.

Then people start copying and publishing it all over the web. How are you going to feel about that? Not too good given the blood, sweat and tears you put into creating it. The question is whether fair use allows them to do this? The answer might surprise you.

Under the concept of fair use, I can use your copyrighted work without your permission. That being said, there are limitations to this right. I can only use it as part of a review or criticism of the work; in news reporting; teaching; scholarship or research. Let's look at two examples to flesh this out.

Let's assume your wrote a science fiction novel. I have a site wherein I review the latest sci-fi novels. Can I use your novel on my site without permission? Yes, because I am providing a review and/or criticism of it.

Now let's take the same scenario with a twist. You publish the novel and I copy the cover and summary for it off of Amazon, optimize the page and try to get ranked number one for it so I can make money on affiliate sales. Can I do this? Not under the provisions of fair use because it doesn't fit any of the acceptable categories. That being said, neither you nor your publisher is going to be complaining much since you get revenues from each sale, but this is a subject for another article.

Fair use is clearly a justifiable defense to a copyright infringement claim so long as you are using the copyrighted material within one of the acceptable areas. If you are not, then fair use is simply not a defense of any sort.

Richard A. Chapo is with SanDiegoBusinessLawFirm.com - providing copyright registration services.

Is Media Plagiarism Between Mediums Acceptable?

Should a blog post on someone's website end up verbatim in a newspaper or magazine publication? Is taking the dialogue from a television news show and publishing it in print an acceptable practice? With technology and media being what they are today, this type of thing happens all the time. Publishing duplicate content on the internet will get flagged by software that checks for duplicate content or previous publication, but what about cross-medium media plagiarism? How do you avoid that? It happens every day both on and off the internet. Is there a way to prevent it?

In many cases the answer is no. The best plagiarism software can only check submitted content and match it to any other similar content found online or on offline proprietary databases. Video and television, unless there is a published script on the web, cannot be flagged with this method. The best you can do is to transcribe the story and then check the transcription with the plagiarism software. This isn't as difficult as you might think. Closed captioning can do it for you if it's available. Transcripts may also be available directly from the media outlet that airs the story.

One of the more common forms of media plagiarism comes in the form of scientific research plagiarism. This is not as easily detectable as other forms of plagiarism where matched content can be flagged. The scientific discovery itself could be the item plagiarized, and writing about it as if it were your own is every bit a copyright infringement as copying and pasting the exact content. In order to write scientific white papers, data is necessary to back up the statements made in plain prose. Taking that data from another source that is not your own is also considered plagiarism.

Retype a newspaper story and publish it on the internet. Copy and paste a web story and publish it in print. Download a television script or scientific whitepaper and claim it for your own. These are the types of cross-medium plagiarism instances that modern technology has made possible. The technology to detect these abuses has also improved along the way, but ultimately the only way to prevent it is through the integrity of writers and editors. There are far too many instances where duplicate content is submitted and editors just don't care. That needs to stop.

In February 2011, Google put through a change in their search algorithm called Google Panda, or Google Farmer as it is known in some circles. Part of this change involved the devaluation of duplicate content, essentially dropping any website that uses it from a prominent page position down to one in search engine oblivion. This change is a start, but it doesn't cover material or content that isn't published on the internet. There are companies that will buy printed material, like school papers for instance, and resell them for reproduction by students in other locales. This practice, heinous as it is, is not punishable by any significant fine or legal penalty, like other forms of plagiarism are. Hopefully, some day it will be.

As a player in the field of content creation I have a unique perspective on technology and content distribution. My goal is to raise awareness of trends that could ultimately hurt the validity of that content.

Resources:
Plagiarism Software

Copyright Law and Artificial Intelligent Chess Playing Machines - Seriously?

In the future, artificial intelligent computers will come up with new designs, concepts, ideas, innovations, and inventions. Indeed these super computer artificial intelligent systems will be every bit as much as brilliant in creativity as humans. In the future artificial intelligent computers may end up violating copyright law, they may also violate patent laws, and cause their programmers, designers, and the corporations which run them lawsuits in the arena of intellectual property.

There was an interesting article recently posted to SlashDot Online by Samzenpus on June 29, 2011 titled; "From the Cheaters-Never-Win-More-Than-4-Times Department" which stated;

"Rybka [AI chess computer], the winner of the last four World Computer Chess Championships, has been found guilty by a panel of 34 chess engine programmers of plagiarizing two open-source chess engines: Crafty and Fruit. The WCCC, and ICGA is even demanding that Rybka's author, international chess master and MIT graduate, returns the trophies & prize money that he fraudulently won & not allowed to compete in the World Championships. ICGA is asking other tournaments around the world to do the same."

Okay so, the ICGA International Computer Games Association, governing body of the WCCC, are calling out the plagiarized code. Is this intellectual property theft, a patent law violation, or just a pure and simple case of copyright plagiarism? And realize that it is a computer program which has been disqualified, which by the way was born that way; it didn't encode its own DNA so to speak.

Now then, I'd like to speak to another comment, and this goes far beyond this article, but it is a futurist topic. In the future intelligent computers will be programming themselves, and finding the most optimal way to do that. They will rewire themselves, and reprogram themselves. Surely, since they started from the same point, they may come to the same answer. Therefore they may be using similar code, and strategies to solve certain problems in the marketplace for their owners.

This means it will be very easy for these super computer artificial intelligence systems to impede upon each other, and perhaps without even knowing it copy each other's work. The poor human race in the middle doesn't have a chance, and the AI system will always be 12 or 13 moves ahead. The court system will not be able to keep up with it all, and even the court system will have an artificial intelligent computer deciding who's right and wrong.

That might speed up the court cases, as a super artificial intelligent computer can calculate an exoFlop per second, so it can render its legal decision within 0.03874626 seconds, about the time that it takes Google to do your search. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 23,850 articles by July 4, 2011 is going to be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..

Copyright - The Concept of Fixed Creations

Copyright law is loved by creators of material that can be copyrighted and disliked by most everyone else. Before the web rolled around, the scope of copyright law was fairly well established. Once the world started going digital, all heck broke loose. If you want to understand copyright, you need to grasp what can be copyrighted. This brings us to the concept of fixed creations.

Although I stink at them, I enjoy a good video game or two. To say they have evolved beyond the first games of Pong and Missile Command is a slight understatement. What might surprise you, however, is to learn that copyright law has evolved massively as well when it comes to video games. How so? The first games were not allowed to be copyrighted! We'll get back to that in a moment because it fleshes out the concept of fixed creations.

So, what is a fixed creation of the mind? It is an original work that is a result of the creativity of the author. It cannot be something that is simply observed or already exists. Let's consider some examples.

Stephen King is a rather prolific writer. Imagine his writing process. He sits and thinks up some truly wild things in his mind. This is then reduced to writing and published. The resulting book is clearly a product of his imagination and is fixed in the form of text. It is a classic copyrightable item.

Now let's return to our video game issue. The first video games were not allowed to be copyrighted because courts ruled the moving images were manifested by the players, and thus weren't creative. This obviously tells us how little judges understood in regard to video games. Eventually, an enterprising lawyer was able to get a judge to understand that the game was made up of a creative idea of a designer that was reduced to code and could be replicated. Given this, the game was a fixed creation of the mind and could be copyrighted. If this change hadn't been made, you would associate Halo with angels instead of Xbox.

Copyright is a fairly simple concept to understand in theory. Applying it to real world situations can be a bit more complex. Making sure you understand the concept of fixed creations will take you a long way to getting it right.

Richard A. Chapo is with SanDiegoBusinessLawFirm.com - providing copyright transfer agreement preparation services.