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Copyright: Difference between revisions
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The copyright owner is granted the ''right'' to stop certain uses, not the ''requirement'' to do so. This is different from [[Trademark|trademarks]]; if you don't "police" your mark (stop misuse of it), then if there is a lawsuit the court may declare your mark generic (allowing anyone to use it) because you didn't actively protect it, or abandoned (you stopped associating the mark with the good or service). This requirement is not applicable to copyright; the copyright owner is allowed to use that right selectively; they can ignore 4,000 violations and then successfully drop a hammer on the 4,001st; the fact they didn't go after the several thousand other unauthorized uses is not an issue the court is going to notice or care about. For instance, it was okay for [[JK Rowling|J.K. Rowling]] to approve the ''HP Lexicon'' when it was just a Web site, but she attempted to throw the book at its author when it was being made into a book. This is due to the fact that Trademark is governed by the Commerce Clause of the Constitution rather than the Copyright/Patent clause. Trademarks only have value insofar as they represent ''something else.'' Copyrighted works are valuable as themselves.
The right to stop some uses is not a natural right. Copyright as it exists now is a creation of government, and the rights the copyright owner does have can be and are restricted for some uses and not others. Basically it depends on who has better lobbyists to meet with members of Congress and get their side's interests put into law. The very first form of Copyright was [
There are six basic rights covered by copyright: reproduction (the ability to make copies), adaptation (translating to another medium, like turning a book into a movie or video game, or vice-versa), public distribution (issuing copies), public performance (performing a play), public display (showing a painting in a museum), and digital (running a computer program). Not every type of copyright work is protected by all rights. For instance, there is no performance right for sculptures. Sound recordings do not have the public performance or display right, the results of a compromise the music industry deeply regrets. The copyright holder can license away any or all of these right to different parties at different times. Further, it can subdivide the rights even further (one company can get the adaptation rights for film, another for television). Finding out who owns what rights and for how long can keep a copyright lawyer busy for a long time.
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