J
jose lopez
Guest
What is the name of your state?Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
<Am a video producer from Mexico, i make biology documentaries, from what
i have read the copyright law applies the same to foreigners as to US citizens.
Here is my doubt, i use biology books and articles in the internet to prepare the text of my videos (which are intended for comercial use), according to what i have read as long as don`t infringe the copyrights of the authors of these books am not obliged to mention them in my videos, and i don´t want to do this because it could awaken greed and law suits and troubles.
Next i like to quote Supreme Court justice O`Connor comments on a land mark
case of copyrights: Feist publications Inc. against Rural Telephone service, in March 29 1991.
The lower courts decided that Feist publications was guilty of a copyright violation because it did included listings from Rural telephone service directory in their own directory.
The supreme court changed this decision into not guilty, next are the reasons given by justice O`Connor:
"The most fundamental axiom of copyright law is that no author may copyright his ideas or the facts he narrates. At the same time it is beyond dispute that compilations of facts are within the sbuject matter of copyright"
"The key to resolving this question lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable. The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection a work must be original to the author"
"Original, as the term is use in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opossed to copied from other works) and it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity"
"As in the Trademark cases the Court emphasized the creative component of originality. It described copyright as being limited to original intellectual conceptions of the author, and stressed the importance of requiring an author
who accuses another of infrigement to prove the exitence of those facts of originality, of intellectual production, of thought and conceptions"
".It is this bedrock principle of copyright that mandates the law seemingly disparate treatment of facts and factual compilations, No one can claim originality as to facts"
"Census takers, for example do not create the population figures that emerges from their efforts, in a sense, they copy figures from the world around them"
"Census data therefore do not trigger copyright becuase these data are not original in the constitutional sense"
"The same is true of all facts scientific, historical, biographical and news of the day, They may not be copyrghted and are part of the public domain to every person"
"The mere fact that a work is copyrighted does not mean that every element
of the work may be protected. Originality remains the sine qua non of copyright; accordingly, copyright protection may extend only to those components of a work that are original to the author"
"If the compilation author clothes facts with an original collocation of words
, he or she may be able to claim a copyright in this written expresion. Other may copy the underlying facts from the publication, but not the precise words used to ptresent them"
"No matter how original the format, however, the facts themselves do not
become original through association"
"A subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts in another`s publication to aid in preaparing a compiting work, so long as the compiting work does not feature the same selection and arrangement. As one commentator explains it:
no matter how much original authorship the work displays , the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."
"To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expressions, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work."
"This principle , known as the idea/expression or fact/expression dichotomy, apllies to all works of authorship: As applied to a factual compilation assuming the absence of original written expression, only the compiler´s selection and arrangement may be protected; the raw facts may be copied at will."
"Copyright does not prevent subsequent users from copying from a prior author`s work those constituent elements that are not original, for example facts, or materials in the public domain, as long as such use does not unfairly appropriate the author`s original contributions"
"This, then, resolves the the doctrinal tension, copyright treats facts and factual compilations in a wholly consistent manner. Facts wheter alone or as part of a compilation, are not original and cannot be copyrighted. A factual
compilation is eligible for copyrightif if it features an original selection or arrangement of facts, but the copyright is limited to the particular selection or arrangement. In no event may copyright extend to the facts themselves"
And those are the comments that convince me that as long as i don`t use the same selection and arrangements of words, the same phrases written
in books and other places, am not infringing anybodies copyright, and am not obliged to include the names of the authors in the credits.
But wait, after all am not a lawyer, maybe am missing something, am i braking
the copy right law in some way? if i don´t mention anybodies` name is not that plagiarism?
Thanks for any guidance, this is verry important to me.
<Am a video producer from Mexico, i make biology documentaries, from what
i have read the copyright law applies the same to foreigners as to US citizens.
Here is my doubt, i use biology books and articles in the internet to prepare the text of my videos (which are intended for comercial use), according to what i have read as long as don`t infringe the copyrights of the authors of these books am not obliged to mention them in my videos, and i don´t want to do this because it could awaken greed and law suits and troubles.
Next i like to quote Supreme Court justice O`Connor comments on a land mark
case of copyrights: Feist publications Inc. against Rural Telephone service, in March 29 1991.
The lower courts decided that Feist publications was guilty of a copyright violation because it did included listings from Rural telephone service directory in their own directory.
The supreme court changed this decision into not guilty, next are the reasons given by justice O`Connor:
"The most fundamental axiom of copyright law is that no author may copyright his ideas or the facts he narrates. At the same time it is beyond dispute that compilations of facts are within the sbuject matter of copyright"
"The key to resolving this question lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable. The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection a work must be original to the author"
"Original, as the term is use in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opossed to copied from other works) and it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity"
"As in the Trademark cases the Court emphasized the creative component of originality. It described copyright as being limited to original intellectual conceptions of the author, and stressed the importance of requiring an author
who accuses another of infrigement to prove the exitence of those facts of originality, of intellectual production, of thought and conceptions"
".It is this bedrock principle of copyright that mandates the law seemingly disparate treatment of facts and factual compilations, No one can claim originality as to facts"
"Census takers, for example do not create the population figures that emerges from their efforts, in a sense, they copy figures from the world around them"
"Census data therefore do not trigger copyright becuase these data are not original in the constitutional sense"
"The same is true of all facts scientific, historical, biographical and news of the day, They may not be copyrghted and are part of the public domain to every person"
"The mere fact that a work is copyrighted does not mean that every element
of the work may be protected. Originality remains the sine qua non of copyright; accordingly, copyright protection may extend only to those components of a work that are original to the author"
"If the compilation author clothes facts with an original collocation of words
, he or she may be able to claim a copyright in this written expresion. Other may copy the underlying facts from the publication, but not the precise words used to ptresent them"
"No matter how original the format, however, the facts themselves do not
become original through association"
"A subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts in another`s publication to aid in preaparing a compiting work, so long as the compiting work does not feature the same selection and arrangement. As one commentator explains it:
no matter how much original authorship the work displays , the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."
"To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expressions, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work."
"This principle , known as the idea/expression or fact/expression dichotomy, apllies to all works of authorship: As applied to a factual compilation assuming the absence of original written expression, only the compiler´s selection and arrangement may be protected; the raw facts may be copied at will."
"Copyright does not prevent subsequent users from copying from a prior author`s work those constituent elements that are not original, for example facts, or materials in the public domain, as long as such use does not unfairly appropriate the author`s original contributions"
"This, then, resolves the the doctrinal tension, copyright treats facts and factual compilations in a wholly consistent manner. Facts wheter alone or as part of a compilation, are not original and cannot be copyrighted. A factual
compilation is eligible for copyrightif if it features an original selection or arrangement of facts, but the copyright is limited to the particular selection or arrangement. In no event may copyright extend to the facts themselves"
And those are the comments that convince me that as long as i don`t use the same selection and arrangements of words, the same phrases written
in books and other places, am not infringing anybodies copyright, and am not obliged to include the names of the authors in the credits.
But wait, after all am not a lawyer, maybe am missing something, am i braking
the copy right law in some way? if i don´t mention anybodies` name is not that plagiarism?
Thanks for any guidance, this is verry important to me.