 | | Copyright Act of 1976 | | Full title: An Act for the general revision of the Copyright Law, title 17 of the United States Code, and for other purposes. | | Enacted by the: 94th Congress | | Effective Date: January 1, 1978 | | Citations | | Public Law: Pub. L. 94-553 | | U.S. Statutes at Large: 90 Stat. 2541 (1976) | | Codification | | Act(s) amended: Copyright Act of 1909 | | Title(s) amended: 17 (Copyright) | | United States Code sections created: 17 U.S.C. §§ 101-810 | | United States Code sections substantially amended: 44 U.S.C. §§ 505 & 2113; 18 U.S.C. § 2318 | | Legislative history | | | | Major amendments | | Digital Millennium Copyright Act; Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act | The Copyright Act of 1976 is a landmark statute in United States copyright legislation and remains the primary basis of copyright law in the United States. The Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, codified the doctrine of "fair use", and converted the term of copyrights from a fixed period requiring renewal to an extended period based on the date of the creator's death. It became Public Law number 94-553 on October 19, 1976 and went into effect on January 1, 1978. The Great Seal of the United States, obverse side. ...
The Ninety-fourth United States Congress was in session from 1975 to 1977. ...
The Copyright Act of 1909 was a landmark statute in United States statutory copyright law. ...
Seal of the Senate The United States Senate is one of the two chambers of the Congress of the United States, the other being the House of Representatives. ...
John Little McClellan (25 February 1896 – 28 November 1977) was a member of the US Senate|United States Senate and United States House of Representatives from Arkansas. ...
The Democratic Party is one of the two major political parties in the United States. ...
Official language(s) English Capital Little Rock Largest city Little Rock Area - Total - Width - Length - % water - Latitude - Longitude Ranked 29th 137,732 km² 385 km 420 km 2. ...
U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, or (more commonly) the House Judiciary Committee, is a standing committee of the United States House of Representatives. ...
The U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary (informally Senate Judiciary Committee) is a standing committee of the United States Senate, the upper house of the United States Congress. ...
Seal of the Senate The United States Senate is one of the two chambers of the Congress of the United States, the other being the House of Representatives. ...
The chamber of the United States House of Representatives is located in the south wing of the Capitol building, in Washington, D.C.. The United States House of Representatives is one of the two houses of the Congress of the United States. ...
Seal of the Senate The United States Senate is one of the two chambers of the Congress of the United States, the other being the House of Representatives. ...
The chamber of the United States House of Representatives is located in the south wing of the Capitol building, in Washington, D.C.. The United States House of Representatives is one of the two houses of the Congress of the United States. ...
Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. ...
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law. ...
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. ...
Copyright symbol. ...
The fair use doctrine is an aspect of United States copyright law that provides for the licit, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another authors work under a four-factor balancing test. ...
History & purpose Before the 1976 Act, the last major revision to statutory copyright law in the United States occurred in 1909. In deliberating the Act, Congress noted that extensive technological advances had occurred since the adoption of the 1909 Act. Television, motion pictures, sound recordings, and radio were cited as examples. The Act was designed in part to address intellectual property questions raised by these new forms of communication. (see House report number 94-1476) A statute is a formal, written law of a country or state, written and enacted by its legislative authority, perhaps to then be ratified by the highest executive in the government, and finally published. ...
Congress in Joint Session. ...
For other uses see film (disambiguation) Film refers to the celluliod media on which movies are printed Film — also called movies, the cinema, the silver screen, moving pictures, photoplays, picture shows, flicks, or motion pictures, — is a field that encompasses motion pictures as an art form or as part of...
Methods and media for sound recording are varied and have undergone significant changes between the first time sound was actually recorded for later playback until now. ...
Intellectual property, or IP, refers to a legal entitlement which sometimes attaches to the expressed form of an idea, or to some other intangible subject matter. ...
The chamber of the United States House of Representatives is located in the south wing of the Capitol building, in Washington, D.C.. The United States House of Representatives is one of the two houses of the Congress of the United States. ...
Aside from advances in technology, the other main impetus behind the adoption of the 1976 Act was the development of and the United States' participation in the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) (and its anticipated participation in the Berne Convention). While the U.S. became a party to the UCC in 1955, the machinery of government was slow to update U.S. copyright law to conform to the Convention's standards. In the years following the United States' adoption of the UCC, Congress commissioned multiple studies on a general revision of copyright law, culminating in a published report in 1961. A draft of the bill was introduced in both the House and Senate in 1964, but the original version of the Act was revised multiple times between 1964 and 1976 (see House report number 94-1476). The bill was passed as S. 22 of the 94th Congress by a vote of 97-0 in the Senate on February 19, 1976. S. 22 was passed by a vote of 316-7 in the House of Representatives on September 22, 1976. The final version was adopted into law as title 17 of the United States Code on October 19, 1976 when Gerald R. Ford signed it. The law went into effect on January 1, 1978. The Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), adopted at Geneva in 1952, is one of the two principal international conventions protecting copyright; the other is the Berne Convention. ...
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, sometimes called the Berne Union or Berne Convention, adopted at Berne in 1986, first established the recognition of copyrights between sovereign nations. ...
Seal of the Senate The United States Senate is one of the two chambers of the Congress of the United States, the other being the House of Representatives. ...
The United States Code (U.S.C.) is a compilation and codification of the general and permanent federal Law of the United States. ...
Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. ...
At the time, the law was considered to be a fair compromise between publishers' and authors' rights. Barbaro Ringer, the U.S. Register of Copyrights, called the new law "a balanced compromise that comes down on the authors' and creators' side in almost every instance" (Time, 1 November 1976). The law was almost exclusively discussed in publishers' and librarians' journals, and with the exception of a half page article in Time, was not discussed in mainstream publications at all. The claimed advantage of the law's extension of the term of subsisting copyrights was that "royalties will be paid to widows and heirs for an extra 19 years for such about-to-expire copyrights as those on Sherword Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, …"(Time, 1 November 1976). The other intent of the extension was to protect authors' rights "for life plus 50 years ---the most common term internationally and the one Twain fought for in his lifetime" (Time, 1 November 1976). Even further extensions of both term and scope have been desired by some, as foreshadowed by the contemporary quote made by James Fitzpatrick (a Recording Industry Association of America copyright lawyer) in response to a question about whether his workload would decrease with the passage of the bill: "It's clear, that I'll continue to be occupied" (Time, 1 November 1976). (Clockwise from upper left) Time magazine covers from May 7, 1945; July 25, 1969; December 31, 1999; September 14, 2001; and April 21, 2003. ...
Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a famous and popular American humorist, novelist, writer and lecturer. ...
Significant portions of the Act The 1976 Act, through its terms, preempts all previous copyright law in the United States. The preempted law includes prior federal legislation, such as the Copyright Act of 1909, but also includes all relevant common law and state copyright laws insofar as they conflict with the Act. Common Law, now often referred to as Non-statutory law is the foundation for justice in the Union States under our constitional scheme. ...
Subject matter of copyright Under section 102 of the Act, copyright protection extends to "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." The Act defines "works of authorship" as any of the following: (1) literary works, (2) musical works, including any accompanying words, (3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music, (4) pantomimes and choreographic works, (5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, (6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works, and (7) sound recordings. An eighth category, architectural works, was added in 1990. Look up Fixation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Fixation in human psychology refers to the state where an individual becomes obsessed with an attachment to another human, animal or inanimate object. ...
Wind turbines A machine is any mechanical or organic device that transmits or modifies energy to perform or assist in the performance of tasks. ...
Literature is literally acquaintance with letters as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latin littera meaning an individual written character (letter)). The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts, mainly novels, drama and poetry. ...
Music is an art, entertainment, or other human activity which involves organized and audible sound, though definitions vary. ...
This article does not cite its references or sources. ...
Pantomime may refer to two different types of performing arts. ...
Choreography literally dance-writing, also known as dance composition), is the art of making structures in which movement occurs, the term composition may also refer to the navigation or connection of these movement structures. ...
For images in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Images. ...
As a noun, a graphic usually refers to a computer image or picture, or an infographic, such as a chart. ...
A sculpture is a three-dimensional, man-made object selected for special recognition as art. ...
The Parthenon on top of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece Table of architecture, Cyclopaedia, 1728 The following article focuses on built environment, the architecture of spaces designed for human habitation. ...
The wording of section 102 is significant mainly because it effectuated a major change in the mode of United States copyright protection. Under the last major statutory revision to U.S. copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1909, federal statutory copyright protection attached to original works only when those works were 1) published and 2) had a notice of copyright affixed. State copyright law governed protection for unpublished works before the adoption of the 1976 Act, but published works, whether containing a notice of copyright or not, were governed exclusively by federal law. If no notice of copyright was affixed to a work and the work was, in fact, "published" in a legal sense, the 1909 Act provided no copyright protection and the work became part of the public domain. Under the 1976 Act, however, section 102 says that copyright protection extends to original works that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Thus, the 1976 Act broadened the scope of federal statutory copyright protection from "published" works to works that are "fixed." The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...
Exclusive rights Section 106 granted five exclusive rights to copyright holders: (1) the right to reproduce (copy), (2) the right to create derivative works of the original work, (3) the right to sell, lease, or rent copies of the work to the public, (4) the right to perform the work publicly (if the work is a literary, musical, dramatic, choreographic, pantomime, motion picture, or other audiovisual work), and (5) the right to display the work publicly (if the work is a literary, musical, dramatic, choreographic, pantomime, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, motion picture, or other audiovisual work). The Act was amended in 1995 to include a sixth exclusive right—the right to perform a sound recording by means of digital audio. (There is arguably concurrently a right not to act should one desire not to. However, challenge to the right not to act might be made by reference to Congress's authority to make copyright statutes: to promote the progress of science and useful arts; failure to exploit or to allow exploitation of one's creation may reduce or even turn back progress.)
Fair use Additionally, the fair use defense to copyright infringement was codified for the first time in section 107 of the 1976 Act. Fair use was not a novel proposition in 1976, however, as federal courts had been using a common law form of the doctrine since the 1840s (an English version of fair use appeared much earlier). The Act codified this common law doctrine with little modification. Under section 107, the fair use of a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement, even if such use technically violates section 106. While fair use explicitly applies to use of copyrighted work for criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research purposes, the defense is not limited to these areas. The Act gives four factors to be considered to determine whether a particular use is a fair use: (1) the purpose and character of the use (commercial or educational, transformative or reproductive); (2) the nature of the copyrighted work (fictional or factual, the degree of creativity); (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion of the original work used; and (4) the effect of the use upon the market (or potential market) for the original work. The Act was later amended to extend the fair use defense to unpublished works. Copyright infringement (also known as piracy) is the unauthorized use of copyrighted material in a manner that violates one of the copyright owners exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works that build upon it. ...
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Royal motto (French): Dieu et mon droit (Translated: God and my right) Englands location within the British Isles Official language English de facto Capital London de facto Largest city London Area – Total Ranked 1st UK 130,395 km² Population – Total (mid-2004) – Total (2001 Census) – Density Ranked 1st UK...
In education, teachers are those who teach students or pupils, often a course of study or a practical skill. ...
Scholarly method - or as it is more commonly called, scholarship - is the body of principles and practices used by scholars to make their claims about the world as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public. ...
Street markets such as this one in Rue Mouffetard, Paris are still common in France. ...
Term of protection Previous copyright law set the duration of copyright protection at twenty-eight years with a possibility of a twenty-eight year extension, for a total maximum term of fifty-six years. The 1976 Act, however, substantially increased the term of protection. Section 302 of the Act extended protection to "a term consisting of the life of the author and 50 years after the author's death." In addition, the Act created a static seventy-five year term (dated from the date of publication) for anonymous works, pseudonymous works, and works made for hire. In 1998 the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended copyright protection to the duration of the author's life plus seventy years for general copyrights and to ninety-five years for works made for hire. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. ...
Transfer of copyright Section 204 of the Act governs the transfer of ownership of copyrights. The section requires a copyright holder to sign a written instrument of conveyance that expressly transfers ownership of the copyright to the intended recipient for a transfer to be effective. Prior case law on this issue was conflicting, with some cases espousing a rule similar to section 204 and others reaching a quite different conclusion. A 1942 New York case, for example, held the opposite—the court said that while a copyright in a work is distinct from a property right in the work, the copyright must be expressly withheld by the author if the work is sold or it will automatically transfer with the property right in the work. While the 1976 Act retains the property right/copyright distinction (in section 202), section 204 eliminates the inconsistent common law by assuming that the copyright is withheld by the author unless it is expressly transferred. Official language(s) English Capital Albany Largest city New York City Area - Total - Width - Length - % water - Latitude - Longitude Ranked 27th 141,205 km² 455 km 530 km 13. ...
Registration & deposit According to section 408 of the Act, registration of a work with the Copyright Office is not a prerequisite for copyright protection. The Act does, however, allow for registration, and gives the Copyright Office the power to promulgate the necessary forms. Aside from Copyright Office paperwork, the Act requires only that one copy, or two copies if the work has been published, be deposited with the Office to accomplish registration. Though registration is not required for copyright protection to attach to a work, section 411 of the Act does require registration before a copyright infringement action by the creator of the work can proceed. Even if registration is denied, however, an infringment action can continue if the creator of the work joins the Copyright Office as a defendant, requiring the court to determine the copyrightability of the work before addressing the issue of infringement. The United States Copyright Office, a part of the Library of Congress, is the official U.S. government body that maintains records of copyright registration in the United States. ...
See also The power to enact United States copyright law is granted in Article One, section 8, of the United States Constitution, which states: The Congress shall have Power. ...
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law. ...
References - US Copyright Office, Title 17
- Cornell Law School, on Copyright
- World wide school.org
- "Righting Copyright". (1 November 1976). Time, pp 92
- New York Law School Law Review (1977) The Complete Guide to the New Copyright LawLorenz Press Inc. ISBN 0-89328-013-5
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