Bringing Yourself Up to Speed with AAC, MP3, and Digital Audio - Copyright Law for Digital Audiophiles
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Unless you’ve created an original work yourself and needed to protect it, you may well never have needed to bother yourself with copyright law. But if you’re listening to digital audio on your iPod, knowing the basics of copyright law is a good idea, for two reasons:
- You can make sure you don’t take any actions that breach copyright law (or that, if you do take such actions, you do so wittingly rather than otherwise).
- You can be an empowered consumer and defend your rights against companies (as well as lobbyists and lobbied governments) that want to take them away from you for commercial reasons.
NOTE: This section discusses U.S. law. If you live in another country, check the laws to make sure your actions with copyrighted works stay within them.
What Copyright Is Copyright consists of a set of laws designed to encourage authors to produce original works by preventing other people from copying those works without permission. Copyright protection acts as an incentive for authors to put time into creating works in the hope of receiving money from the sales of those works.
For example, say you write the ultimate truck-driving anthem. Copyright ensures Garth Brooks can’t make a hit of it and rake in millions of dollars without your granting him (or his record company) the right to record and distribute the song. In exchange for granting those rights, you’ll receive money, typically. Without copyright, you might receive nothing.
Copyright applies to almost all original works. There are some limitations: the key one is that you can copyright only the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. For example, you can’t copyright the idea of your truck-driving anthem—you have to go ahead and write the anthem. Once you’ve stored the anthem in a tangible form (for example, by writing it on paper or as a computer file, or by recording it), you have a copyrighted work. You don’t even have to register the copyright with the Copyright Office, but doing so is a good idea because it makes dealing with copyright infringements much easier. For works created since January 1, 1978, copyright lasts until 70 years after the death of the author or last surviving coauthor (“life plus 70”).
Corporate copyrights last for 95 years, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The extension means that The Walt Disney Company will keep control of Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse until the 2020s. Similarly, Time Warner retains the rights to vast numbers of early music recordings, television episodes, and movies (such as Gone with the Wind and Casablanca). As you might imagine, Disney was one of the companies that lobbied for the extension. The Copyright Term Extension Act was challenged in 2002 but was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2003.
 This is chapter three of How to Do Everything with Your iPod & iPod Mini, by Guy Hart-Davis (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, ISBN 0072254521, 2004). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
Buy this book now. |
Next: When You Can Copy Copyrighted Material Legally, and Why >>
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