| Trademark Fair Use |
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| A party is entitled to use a trademark in such as way as to describe the qualities that a mark represents as long as the manner of use of the mark is not as a trademark but only used in a descriptive sense. Fair use of a trademark occurs when a defendant uses a descriptive trademark of another party to describe the defendant's own product. This is the fair use defense set forth in the Lanham Act that provides: More... |
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| Works of Authorship under the Copyright Act |
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| The Copyright Act uses the phrase "works of authorship" to describe the types of works that are protected by copyright law. This phrase is purposefully broad to avoid the need to rewrite the Copyright Act every time a new "medium" was discovered. Congress included a list of eight works of authorship in the Copyright Act as follows: More... |
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| Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 |
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| The moral rights of authors that are recognized in the Berne Convention are: (1) the right of attribution, which is the right to be identified as the author of a work or to be disassociated from a work such as by publishing a work anonymously or under a pseudonym; and (2) the right of integrity, which allows an author to prevent distortion or mutilation of the work. Additional moral rights granted by French law include the right to decide whether the work may be disclosed to the public, the right to withdraw a disclosed work from the public, and the right to reply to criticism of the work in the same medium in which the criticism was presented. Moral rights exist independently of any property rights in the copyrighted work and are kept by the author even if the copyrighted work is sold or transferred. Outside the United States, if another person owns the property right to a copyrighted work, the exercise of moral rights--such as ordering the publishing of a book to cease--may require the author to compensate the owner of the property right for any economic loss that results. In many jurisdictions, moral rights may be waived. More... |
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| Distribution Rights |
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| The distribution right grants to the copyright holder the exclusive right to make a work available to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership or by rental, lease, or lending. The owner of a copyright has the right to give away, sell, or withhold any material embodiment of his or her work. In essence, this is the right to control publication of a work because publication without distribution of copies is meaningless. This right allows the copyright holder to prevent the distribution of unauthorized copies of a work. In addition, the right allows the copyright holder to control the first distribution of a particular authorized copy. However, the distribution right is limited by the "first sale doctrine," which states that after the first sale or distribution of a copy, the copyright holder can no longer control what happens to that copy. More... |
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| Regional Patent Offices |
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| The issuance of a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office provides patent protection to an inventor only within the United States. Because each country has its own patent laws, other countries do not provide patent protection to a U.S. patentee, nor does the United States provide patent protection to a foreign patentee. Originally, if a U.S. inventor wished to obtain patent protection in other countries, he or she was required to obtain patents from each country in which patent protection was desired, which obviously entailed substantial time and expense. Eventually, however, international cooperation helped streamline the process of obtaining patents in other countries in many cases. More... |
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