The author of a work, who has created the work has copyright over the work. The copyright may also be held by the publisher. A person or business that wants to use copyrighted materials in some way needs permission to exercise the appropriate rights.
Although we usually think of copyright in terms of written materials, many other kinds of things can be copyrighted: photographs, movies, musical compositions, and recordings of musical compositions, for instance. Some of the toughest legal problems on the Web deal with the fact that a Website can involve "multimedia"-e.g., combinations of items, involving different rights, and whose rights are held by different people.
One of the most important rights in the "bundle" is the right to control "derivative works, " such as sequels and works using the characters of a work of fiction in other contexts. As long as a work is in copyright, only the copyright proprietor can determine how its characters will be used.
Exceptions to Normal Copyright Requirements
Public Domain
Copyright doesn't last forever: material "falls into the public domain" after the copyright expires.
Fair Use
There are also some situations in which some kind of use can be made of copyrighted material
without infringing on the copyright. One of the most important is "fair use": the opposite of
unfairly taking someone else's work. For instance, it is a fair use to discuss the ideas in a book or
article in another book or article, and even to quote short passages as part of a review, discussion,
or comment. There are four major elements in fair use, as defined by Copyright Act ¤107 and a
body of case law:
• How and why the material is used; non-profit educational use is much more likely to be considered fair than for-profit commercial use
• The nature of the work or trademark allegedly copied
• How much of the allegedly copied work is used-and what percentage of the whole it constitutes
• Whether the asserted fair use limits the commercial potential of the allegedly copied work
