All About Copyright

Part of information ethics is creating information and protecting the rights of content creators, which includes you!

Copyright is the exclusive legal right of a content creator, or someone else assigned, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same.

A Copyright Will Protect You From Pirates - by Ioan Sameli - http://bit.ly/lJrePv. Licensed under a Creative Commons by-sa 2.0 license

The original content you create is your intellectual property. This could be a written work, image, or design that is the result of creativity for which you have the right to apply for copyright, patent, or trademark. 

This also means you cannot publicly post or share work that you do not own the copyright for, including academic papers, electronic texts, photos, movies, and music, without the written permission of the copyright holder. Permission is also usually accompanied by a fee to reproduce the material.  

Every country has their own rules for copyright and publishing information. In the U. S., creators automatically own the copyright of work that are created in a fixed, tangible format such as written papers, film, etc. The duration of copyright varies, but the minimum is usually the life of the author plus 70 years after death.

Title 17 of the US Code Links to an external site. gives copyright owners the right to copy, distribute, and display their intellectual property, but often those rights are transferred as part of the publishing process. When academic authors consider journals for potential publication of their articles, they must be aware of the publisher's guidelines regarding copyright.

Copyright can be a complicated issue, but there are several mechanisms that make it possible for academic researchers to use other authors' work to support their own, including fair use, public domain, open access and creative commons licenses that fall within the guidelines of fair and ethical use.