Welcome to xinthemes.com
|
Copyright Infringement
Play It Safe: Making Sure You're Not Committing Copyright Infringement
Copyright infringement is not an easy thing to explain. While it may seem as simple as not using someone else’s work, it’s not that easy. Thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many other organizations, we have the ability to use others’ works – as long as we use it under ‘fair use’ laws. So what does fair use have to do with copyright infringement, and how can you utilize it?
Fair use laws are the conditions in which you can use a copyrighted work without having to pay someone royalties. This includes when you use a copyrighted work for educational or instructional uses, criticism of the work, commentaries on the work, news reporting about the work, teaching on the work (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship uses, and research. This is talked about fully in Section 107 of the Copyright Code (commonly called Fair Use) and is available for you to read at your local library.
Copyright Infringement in day-to-day life
Sometimes, if you’re writing a paper for work or school, or if you are creating a Power Point presentation, you need to use someone’s work that is already in copyright. So how do you use it without committing copyright infringement? All you have to do is ask – the worst they can say is no, right? But, if they do say no, there are several items in the public domain which may help you to finish your project without having to commit copyright infringement.
What is the public domain, and how does it relate to copyright infringement?
Material that is not copyrighted is considered in the public domain – you cannot commit copyright infringement on works in the public domain. These works include things that the copyright has expired on, or is not copyright-able – such as government publications, jokes, titles, and ideas. Some creators (writers, musicians, artists, and more) deliberately put their work in the public domain, without ever obtaining copyright, by providing an affiliation with Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows people who create materials to forfeit some, or all, of their copyright rights and place their work either partially or fully in the public domain.
So, how do I ensure I’m not committing copyright infringement?
First of all, if you’re going to use someone else’s material, you may want to check the public domain to see if something is suitable for use, instead of trying to use someone else’s copyright. However, if you can’t find something suitable (and you can’t create something yourself), the next best thing (and your only legal course of action) is to find a piece that is in copyright, and contacting the copyright holder.
When you contact the copyright holder, make sure you tell them what you want to use their piece for – whether it’s for your blog, podcast, or report – and ask them if you can use it. You may have to pay royalties, or an attribution in your piece, or a combination of both. The creator may also place many limitations on when and how you can use their material. Follow all these instructions they give you, and you’ll be free and clear to use their work as you want.
Once you have permission to use a copyrighted work, you need to make sure you stay within the agreed-upon boundaries - if you veer outside their agreed terms, you may open yourself up for a copyright infringement lawsuit – which can be nasty, costly, and time consuming. If you’re in doubt, before contacting the copyright holder, contact a copyright lawyer to ensure you’re following the law – and protect yourself!
Copyright lawyer rating Determining what's in a Copyright Lawyer Rating You can find a copyright lawyer rating these days by doing a quick search online or by subscribing to a mailing list to the copyright lawyer guild. What goes into determining a copyright lawyer rating may be how many cases he/she has won or lost? The person that has won the most cases will be at the top of the rating chart, however someone that just comes in may be at the bottom for lack of experience. If you are searching for a copyright lawyer you will want the best but keep in mind that if they already know their copyright lawyer rating is high, their price might be raised more than the others in the field. So, make sure this is someone you want to represent you or to do your filing. If you are simply getting a copyright you probably don’t have to have the best and can go with your average rating. Someone suing you for copyright infringement or something else means you may want the best; you don’t want one that had a bad copyright lawyer rating. Do you? Today many companies are offering their own little search areas for towns, you might find a whole list of companies that need reviews and chances are those that are all bad rating are from one person. These sites are very new and popping up everywhere, the only way to find out how true the copyright lawyer rating, is by asking them. Another way they do a copyright lawyer rating is by passing out a few sheets of papers with a bunch of copyright lawyers names on them and having their peers rate them. I don’t really consider this fair because someone with the same amount of time and wants to be top in the field may mark their competition down just to get up on top. Not to mention how can they rate them when they may have never heard of them. Do you give that person a bad rating or a one star because you have no clue how they perform? Do you leave it blank? Find out why a copyright lawyer rating got the marks they did. Keep in mind that a client that didn’t win a case can have it out for them and rating them bad or review them as bad in every site that they can, which can cause a big drop in ratings, especially if they are new. Not all lawyers like that fact that just about anyone can rate them online these days, it was easier when their ratings only went with what cases they dealt with, how many they represented and their win/lose streak. There is a website called Martindale, it gives you ratings of many lawyers. This is a great site to come view to find lawyers in all types of fields, not just copyrighting. Explore it, there are a ton of reviews written by lawyers and clients, there are also legal articles, cases, events and much more for you to look at. Don’t forget about the peer ratings, which you can find person most qualified to help you. This is one place that does seem fair when giving out their copyright lawyer rating, they make sure that the top person can only be rated if they’ve been in that field for over 10 years, which makes it fair to a person that has very little experience. They won’t be on the rating list which means they won’t be at the bottom of the list. Remember, if your copyright lawyer rating isn’t up there doesn’t mean he/she is bad, they may have requested not to have it published or may not have been in the field long enough to be judge. The best judge for them will be you. Web Hosting - FTP and Other File Transfer Tools Anything related to the Internet or computers is bound to introduce technical issues pretty soon. One of the earliest that novice web site owners encounter is FTP, which is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. Seeing it spelled out, it's easy to see why those in the know quickly move to speaking in short hand. The reason web site owners soon will (or need to) become familiar with FTP is obvious to anyone who has built a site on a remote server. You have to have some way of getting the files to the remote computer and FTP is one of the most common tools. It's also one of the simplest and most efficient. FTP is composed of two parts: the client software and the server software. It's similar, in a way, to talking to someone on the phone who writes down everything you say. You (the client) make a request ('transfer this file to the server') and the listener (the server) takes the request and acts on it. That request to copy a file from a local computer to the remote one is carried out (often 'under the covers') by a PUT command, as in PUT this there. You create the web page (in the form of a file) and then PUT the file on the server. To move a file in the opposite direction, from the remote server to your local computer, your client software issues a GET command. Many FTP clients have graphical interfaces, similar to Windows Explorer, that allow you to drag-and-drop or otherwise copy the file without ever seeing the actual commands that carry it out. But it's helpful sometimes to know what goes on underneath. In tricky cases it can be an advantage to use a command line interface (in Windows, the 'DOS box', with a similar interface familiar to most Linux users). Knowing the commands and being able to use them in the command line form can sometimes help you diagnose what is going on when the graphical tools misbehave. But FTP is not the only way to get a file from here to there. In fact, your browser moves files around from a remote computer to your local one all the time. In most cases, when you type in or click on a URL, what happens under the covers is in essence a file transfer process. The web page is transferred from the web server to your local computer then displayed by the browser. Alternatively, you can sometimes even email a web page/file from your local computer to the remote server, then use an email client on the server itself to get the file and put it in a folder. That requires that you have some form of access to the remote computer. But there are many ways of doing that, such as in-built utilities in the operating system or using commercial remote control programs. Those alternatives can be helpful to know in cases where the FTP file transfer process is misbehaving. Having more than one way to accomplish the task helps you diagnose what might be going wrong. It also helps you get the job done when the usual tools aren't cooperating. The more you learn about these sometimes puzzling acronyms, the easier you can accomplish your own goals. |