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Copyright

What is copyright infringement? Consider these examples:

• A newspaper reporter's article on an important town council meeting makes the front page. A local radio announcer, without attributing the article to the reporter or the newspaper, reads the lead and several other lines verbatim on his morning news report.
• The editor of a weekly community newspaper reads a magazine article about a local personality and decides to publish it in the newspaper's next edition. She makes sure to affix the copyright notice on the article and to acknowledge that the article originally appeared in the magazine, but she never seeks the magazine's permission to use it.
• A freelancer writes a lengthy article about a famous athlete's drug problems and submits it for publication to a sports magazine. The article appears in the magazine and then in another of the same publisher's publications.

In these cases, the radio announcer, the weekly editor and the magazine publisher infringed the rights of the copyright owners of the original works and may be liable for damages.

The 1976 Copyright Law gives copyright protection to creative works — such as the newspaper article, magazine article and freelance article in the above examples — at the moment of their creation. If someone uses a copyrighted work without permission, as the radio announcer, weekly newspaper editor and magazine publisher have, the copyright owner can sue for copyright infringement. Journalists need to know how to protect their works and how to avoid infringing someone else's copyright.¹

Notes

1. 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq. (1976) (1976 Copyright Law governs works created on or after Jan. 1, 1978).

Next section: Copyright: What can be copyrighted