The owner of a copyright is entitled to certain exclusive rights under the Copyright Act of 1976. These rights include the right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivate works based upon the copyrighted work, to distribute copies of the copyright work to the public by sale or transfer of ownership, to perform the copyrighted…
The term “fair use” refers to the limited permitted copying of copyrighted material without receiving permission from the copyright holders. It is used as a defense against copyright infringement, and if use of a copyrighted work is deemed to be “fair use”, then the action is not considered illegal. The Copyright Act of 1976 cites four factors it uses…
Attorneys Navid Yadegar and Navid Soleymani recently won a hotly contested arbitration involving employment discrimination. The case involved a woman, Elizabeth Carter, who was fired for her disability. At issue in the case was whether the employer, Dunn Edwards, had an obligation to keep employing Ms. Carter even though she could not perform some of the duties of her position…
A “joint work” is a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole. See 17 U.S.C. § 101. A collaborative effort is only classified as a joint work if each author made independently copyrightable contributions to the work and if the authors fully intended…
When we create something, we generally want to be given credit for it. A copyright is perhaps the greatest legal method of ensuring that you will receive credit for the work you created. A copyright is the legal term used for the rights given to the owner to reproduce, distribute, display and create adaptations of a protected work. A…