1. A brief bit about copyright termination rights. Specifically, when can you terminate and get your copyrights back?
15 tweets.
2. We say that 35 years after you’ve assigned a copyright, you can terminate the assignment and get your copyrights back. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that.
3. First of all, the right applies where the “execution of the grant” (the assignment) was on or after 1978. If it was before that, a different set of rules and a different time frame (56 years) applies.
4. Under 17 U.S.C. § 203 of the Copyright Act, the author or their airs can terminate 35 years after the “execution of the grant” – or –
5. If the grant covers the right of “publication”, it’s 35 years from the publication date or 40 years from the execution of the grant, whichever comes first.
6. If you assigned rights to a work before it was released to the public to someone who did release it, then the grant probably covered the “right of publication.”
7. The date of “publication” can be tricky. But in most scenarios the 35 year date from execution is going to be your reference point.
8. Pay attention: the effective termination can be any date within a five-year period from that 35 years.
9. You can serve your notice as much as ten years before the effective date. But you can’t serve it any later than two years before that effective date.
10. So here’s the math. 35 + 5 = 40. 40 – 2 = 38. You must serve that notice within 38 years of the date of the assignment. You can serve as early as 25 years after the assignment, but it wouldn’t be effective for another ten years.
11. What if you don’t know the precise date you assigned your copyright? Good thing there’s a long window. But you can’t miss it.
12. Authors Alliance created this nifty calculator to help you determine your time frame to terminate. It’s helpful, but it’s still a little tricky. You might not know the answers to some of these questions. rightsback.org
13. You might not understand, for instance, when your work was “published” and whether your assignment included the right of publication.
14. You might know if your work was a work for hire, which makes it ineligible for termination.
That's a legal conclusion. And there's room to claim something isn't a work for hire even when the party who currently owns your copyrights says it is.
15. One nice thing about termination rights however, is that have a long window to exercise the right. Although there are strategic disadvantages to notifying too early, you shouldn’t wait until the end of that period. You’ll need time to figure out how it do it right.
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They're relying on an exception to a rule that would otherwise prohibit certain evidence from being used against a witness. But that rule doesn't even apply to the point they are trying to make.
In a very simplified explanation for non-lawyers: Rule 404(b) says you can't use prior "bad acts" of the witness for the purpose of saying "you did bad things before, so you must have done this bad thing we're accusing you of."
1. I’m going to talk a little bit about the Instagram copyright infringement lawsuits. That is, not lawsuits vs. Instagram, but lawsuits by photographers against other people who embed their Instagram photos. A brief thread. About 22 tweets.
2. There have been numerous copyright infringement lawsuits against websites that embed photos from Instagram, including this one:
3. Although we’ve learned a few things from court decisions, there are no clear, bright lines. We probably won’t have any unless there’s a consensus in the federal courts or the Supreme Court takes them on.
Thoughts on Sinclair v. Ziff Davis, which held that Mashable had a third-party license from Instagram to embed plaintiff's photograph on its website. #copyright
Read carefully.
The distinction between embedding a photograph or copying and pasting it comes into play, but for different reasons than Goldman v. Breitbart.
Goldman v. Breitbart isn't the decision to compare this to. Another one is.
The issue in Sinclair is whether, by uploading her photo to Instagram and agreeing to its terms of use, she granted a license to Instagram to sublicense it, and Instagram granted a sublicense for Mashable to embed a photograph.
1. In light of this recent suggestion, I'm going to go over some basic principles about copyright law, "master" recordings, musical works, and recording contracts.
Note: assume ever tweet below has asterisks because there are almost always complications and exceptions.
On the subject of taking photos from the internet and using it for your own website without a license: jury found website owner liable and awarded $150,000 statutory damages per photo infringement. That's $450,000 total.
The Ninth Circuit is kicking it back because of an erroneous instruction on "willful" infringement. Judge wrongly allowed a "should have known" standard. So, on remand, the most the statutory damages can be is $90,000, which is still a lot.
The "should have known" standard isn't good enough for willful infringement. The defendant website was only found liable for contributory copyright infringement, not direct infringement.
1)As promised, here’s a thread scratching the surface on sound recording copyrights, termination rights under the Copyright Act, and authorship. Appearances by Jay Z, KRS-One, and Sheryl Crow.
2) Before 1972, sound recordings weren’t protected by U.S. copyright. Copyright extended to the musical work (the composition), but not the performer.
3) So Otis Redding (or his publisher or heirs) owned a copyright for the song “Respect” but Aretha Franklin didn’t have a copyright for her performance of it.