What is a Copyright Anyway?

For an engaging and in-depth resource on the world of copyrights in general, I recommend visiting Terry Carroll's Copyright FAQ and Copyright Resource Page (also available here while he completes his move to a new service provider). It's truly a great compendium of information and resources from a very qualified source.

Under U.S. law, and in most of the world (at least all signees of the 1971 Berne Convention), material is copyrighted by its author by default. That is, in the very act of creating a work, the author also creates a copyright on that work. A work does not enter the "public domain" unless an author explicitly gives up his rights to such work.

With the meteoric rise of the Internet, a great deal of confusion has arisen over what is legal to copy and what is not. In an age where more information is now stored digitally than on paper, and where even paper copies can be made for pennies in a few seconds, there is no longer any technical barrier to quickly copying and distributing nearly any information. In particular, the phrases "public domain" and "freely distributable" have become popularly confused.

So what is the difference? It's really fairly simple - something that is copyrighted MAY be "freely distributable". Something that is truly "public domain" is by definition freely distributable. But just because something may be distributed freely does NOT make it "public domain". Note carefully that "public domain" and "freely distributable" are not the same!

One may do whatever one wants with a public domain work (except, generally, to claim ownership of it, copyright it and then restrict its use by others). On the other hand, one may only exercise such rights over a copyrighted work as the author has explicitly granted. This is an important distinction. An author may grant almost all rights to a work to the public, and still retain copyright thereon. But there is a significant difference still, because the copyright holder retains the final say over what may and may not be done with the work.

All original material on this web site is copyrighted by the author, unless otherwise noted. This means that, by law, the author is the only one with rights to publish this material in any form whatsoever. No matter how good your intentions, it is illegal for you to publish or redistribute these materials without first obtaining the author's consent.

Why do you care?

I care about this for two reasons:

• First, as an author, I feel that it is important to protect the integrity of what I have written. It may not be the best writing, and I may be wrong in what I say. But I want to at least have confidence that (1) what I have written will be represented accurately (that is, no one can edit it and change the meaning and still present it as "what I wrote"), and (2) no one else will either be accused of, or credited with, having written it. It's not fair to me or the other party if someone else is given the responsibility for having written my words.
• Second, I'd like to have some indication of whether people find this useful. The effort is not just in the writing, but also in the creation and maintenance of the site on which these resources are found. I spend a great deal of time and effort making sure that my sites (I maintain quite a few more sites in addition to this one) are always available and are fast enough to be useful from anywhere in the world. Like everyone else with a web site, I like to have visitors. We do these things both to educate and to fulfill our desires to have an influence. As such, the record of people visiting is a positive, tangible feedback that what we're doing has some value.