Fundamentally, copyright
is a law that gives you ownership over the things you create. Be it a painting,
a photograph, a poem or a novel, if you created it, you own it and it’s the
copyright law itself that assures that ownership. The ownership that copyright
law grants comes with several rights that you, as the owner, have exclusively.
Those rights include:
-The right to reproduce
the work
-To prepare derivative
works
-To distribute copies
-To perform the work
-And to display the work
publicly
These are your rights
and your rights alone. Unless you willingly give them up (EX: A Creative
Commons License), no one can violate them legally. This means that, unless you
say otherwise, no one can perform a piece written by you or make copies of it,
even with attribution, unless you give the OK.
Inversely, if you’re
looking for material to use or reuse, you should not do any of these things
without either asking permission or confirming that the work is in the public
domain, which means that the copyright has expired and all of the above rights have
been forfeited. Simply put, if the work isn’t in the public domain and you
don’t have permission to use a piece, you put yourself in risk of legal action,
regardless of your intentions.
Because, beyond fair use
and parody (issues for later essays), the holder of a copyrighted piece has
rights to do what they want with their work. It’s no different than owning a
car, a house or a pen. One can lend it out to a friend, sell it, modify it or even
destroy it. In short, if you own the copyright to something, you have the same
rights that you do with anything else and, in some instances, even more. After
all, you did create it. It only makes sense that you would own the fruits of
your labor. That’s what copyright law is all about.
Moral Rights
Though moral rights are
not currently recognized in the United States, they’re a major element of
European copyright law and are becoming increasingly important as the Web
becomes more globalized.
Moral rights are a set
of rights that are separate from the author’s copyright on a piece. These
rights are generally considered inalienable, which means that they can not be
given away or sold, and thus persist even if the copyright to a work is
completely sold.
As defined by the Berne
Convention, the moral rights of an author are as follows:
-The right to claim
authorship of the work
-The right to object to
any distortion, mutilation or modification of the work
-The right to object to
any derogatory action that may damage the authors honor or reputation
It is easy to see how
moral rights can be useful in fighting plagiarism since such an act is not only
a violation of the author’s copyright, if he or she holds it, but also the
moral rights. It may also be useful in cases where the copyright of a work has been
lost, either sold or given away, but plagiarism continues.
