User:Sagredo/copyrights and trademarks

Copyright law is not derived from wikipedia consensus

The purpose of this page is to enable graphists and others to rapidly find an effective counter argument when someone questions the copyright status or license tag applied to an image file. It is especially intended to allow the easy defense of images whose copyrights are easily and commonly misunderstood. Note that this should remain a short, cited summary of copyright law discoveries that relate to the graphics lab's work, not a lenghty dicussion on the subject of copyright.

Copyrights v. trademarks
Copyrights and Trademarks are both intellectual property, but very different subjects in the law. Anytime anyone tries to apply the rules of one to the other, they are almost certainly drawing erroneous conclusions. There is a little overlap because some trademarks are eligible be copyrighted and have been.

Intent
Copyrights and trademarks have very different purposes and therefore very different treatment under the law.

Copyrights
Copyrights are designed to allow the original author(s) of a work to have a legal monopoly on the reproduction, use and modification of their work. It gives them the "right" to "copy" it, as many times and ways as they like. Conversely, people doing so without authorization must be able to prove that their work is "fair use" or they are committing copyright infringement. Copyrights do expire at a legally defined time based on publication dates and the death of the author(s).

Trademarks
Trademark can refer to two things: A trademark and the protection of it. A trademark is literally a "mark of a trade", in the semiobsolete sense of the word "trade": A profession or business. These are the symbols used by a firm on their letters, communications, advertisements, merchandize, websites, crates, etc. that iconically show their origin. The protection of these is not the same as copyrighting them: It only prevents other people using them, or things confusingly similar, as a sign of their business, or to show nonexistant relationship. For example, the WikipeidAn logo is trademarked. If another business was to use it on their website, they could potentially be run in for impersonation or misrepresentation. Since we do not use trademarked logos for anything more then identification ("IBM has a logo that looks like this: [image]"), we do not infringe trademark rights. Unlike copyrights, a trademark can be protected forever, as long as the trademark holder continues to use it as a trademark.

Dual protection
Some trademarks can be (and are) copyrighted. In the case of those that can, both protections apply. Some trademarks are free content because they are in the public domain or are under a free license: for example, logos consisting of simple, short text and/or simple objects may not be eligible for copyright protection, and old logos that were published without a copyright notice have likely fallen into the public domain.

"Usage restrictions"
A concept related to trademark is "usage restrictions": Many governments restrict the use of certain images of official looking nature: Coats of arms, in some cases flags, logos of governmental agencies, money, etc. See, for example, the CIA's logo, which cannot be used in a way that implies endorsement, and images of paper money, which cannot be reproduced in a way that makes them look real.

Again, we don't use these in ways that suggest we are being endorsed or recommended by these countries or agencies, or that we are money.

Patents
While patents grant their holder a legal monopoly on the construction or use or something of the object or process described, they cannot prevent other people using the patent filings. See PD-patent

Uncopyrightability
Simple objects such as circles, squares, stars, lines and simple combinations of these are not copyrightable. Images and designs made exclusively from such objects such as many countries' flags are not copyright protected. 

Works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship (for example: standard calendars, height and weight charts, tape measures and rulers, and lists or tables taken from public documents or other common sources)

Signatures
Signatures are not copyrightable in the United States: Signature A signature could be a trademark, such as Calvin Klein, but being a trademark does not give copyright protection.

Maps of streets
In US law, maps of streets are PD as long as they are accurate. To copyright their maps, mapmakers invent roads that don't exist, or sometimes they intentionally misspell an uncommon road name. Usually the best thing to do is cross-reference two maps. 

Fonts and Typefaces
"The U.S. Copyright Office holds that a bitmapped font is nothing more than a computerized representation of a typeface, and as such is not copyrightable." Only the "font output program" is protected. The font files that appear in the C:\WINDOWS\Fonts folder in Windows are of the type of files that may be, but are not necessarily, copyrighted. Tracing bitmapped fonts with an SVG tracer such as Inkscape does not violate the copyright of the original "font output program" (font file).

Non copyrightable material within a copyrighted work
Such material is still not copyrighted. Example - A copyrighted book might contain a paragraph from the Constitution of the United States, or a public domain photograph. The owner of the copyright would not suddenly own a copyright on that part of the Constitution or to that photograph. Even if the photo is altered somewhat, it is a derivation of the original PD photo and not eligible for copyright protection. Similarly, a signature on a poster which might be copyrighted is not given copyright protection, because signatures are ineligible for copyright. Any derivation of the signature is treated as the original - not protected.

Minor derivatives
However a derivative that is sufficiently different to claim copyright on those aspects that are changed would gain copyright protection on the changes only. Change the smile to a frown on the Mona Lisa, file a copyright, and you have the copyright to a frown. Similarly, changing one word in the Federal Constitution doesn't not result in a copyright on the entire document.

Where to Start

 * Image copyright tags/All seems to be the top of the copyright tag list pages.


 * Copyright basics from the U. S. Government


 * A link to something analogous from the U.K. would be good.