Copyright laws for info on websites?
Find answers to your legal question.
Copyright laws for info on websites?
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I was wondering, do sites like IMDb.com (the internet movie database) need any licensing or anything to put up all the information they have about each movie? I was wondering if there are any copyright laws in those cases, or not?
I always wondered if they needed any legal action to put all that stuff up.
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Sadien, Inc.
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General information at-large, is not copyrightable.
Lists, formulas, ideas and functional items additionally are uncopyrightable.
I'll give you an example...
The idea that "George Clooney was born in Lexington, Kentucky" is not granted protection. For the most part, anyone could write that sentence.
However, the text itself, once in a "tangible medium of expression" could be entitled to protection. ("Tangible medium of expression" means that it is written on paper, or saved to disk.)
So, both you and IMDB could write a story about George Clooney growing up in Kentucky. And both of those stories would be entitled to individual Copyright protection, under USC Title 17 Section 101.
This is where it gets "interesting."
IMDB is a "content conglomerate." By that I mean that... IMDB owns the content it writes... and contributors to the site own the content THEY write, however the contributors grant IMDB a license to "display" their content.
(See IMDB's contract at http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions )
Subsequently, 99.999% of IMDB's content is protected by copyright law. Determining who actually owns the content... that's a whole other story.
Fundamentally, all copyright is about "permission."
Either the copyright holder or the law grants you permission to use someone else's intellectual property. (And under the current US law, granting permission almost always falls to the copyright owner.)
Let me know if you have any other questions.
G.C. Hutson, Chief Executive and Senior Partner
Sadien Intellectual Property, Inc.
http://www.Sadien.com |
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Coco
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The simple answer:
Copyrights are AUTOMATICALLY protected under US Copyright Law.
sites like IMDB, since they gather the information and basically write it up in their own format, it could be considered an "original work" so that is copyrightable.
here is a good site to check out: http://www.cilm.com/sigtag/copyright.shtml |
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