Copyright Issues

According to the copyright office one of the rights accorded to the owner of copyright is the right to reproduce or to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phone records. One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of "fair use." The doctrine of fair use has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years and has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.

Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
  
• The nature of the copyrighted work.
  
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
  
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work (U.S. Copyright Office, 2009).
  

A court case in particular that dealt with copyright issues was the case of Bill Graham Archives vs. Dorling Kindersley Ltd. It was filed in 2006 and was not finalized until 2009. The attorneys included William F. Patry, and Richard Dannay, as the judges consisted on Amalya L. Kearse and Reena Raggi whom are circuit judge, and Jane A. Restani as the primary Judge. Basically the case was about a concern that the scope of copyright protection afforded artistic concert posters to be reproduced in reduced size in a biography of the musical group the Grateful Dead. The copyright holder Bill Graham Archives appealed from a judgment of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. The motion for summary judgment was dismissed, and its copyright infringement action against Dorling Kindersley Limited, Dorling Kindersley Publishing, Inc., and R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company was also dismissed. The case was reviewed and the summary was granted. The judge agreed that with the court Dorling Kindersley's reproduction of Bill Graham Archive's images is protected by the fair use and is an exception to copyright infringement (Opengavel, 2009).

This case really cause my attention because I thought that is was very interesting that any little thing that someone publishes or does in any kind of book or magazine or whatever it may be that they need to check on what they are putting in their work and get it copyrighted. There are so many issues with copyrighting and tons of laws on ways that you need to go about doing things, that if you just make one mistake then you are probably going to eventually have a lawsuit coming your way.

I thought this case was interesting because the only thing the company did was reproduce a picture and resize it to put in a biography for the musical group Grateful Dead. But unlike this case there were several other cases that I could of chose from to blog about but for some reason this on caught my attention.