Welcome to the end, or summary, of our course on Protecting Business Innovations via Copyright. We hope that this has been an interesting and educational journey. I certainly hope that its been fun. Now this course is part of a series of courses. Totally, four courses all together, on protecting business innovations in different ways. Copyright is simply one of the ways that we protect business innovations. We also can protect business innovations by a patent, trademark, or a strategy. These are different ways for us to protect our corporations and our ideas and our products from being copied. Copyright is one tool. There are others. But let's summarize where we've been in this course on copyright. In our first module, we talked about the introduction of copyright. We had a lot of questions that we answered during that week. Questions like, what is copyright? Why does it exist? What is protected? What's excluded? How do I get it? What are the rights? Could I be sued, and how would someone prove it or how could I prove it if I was sued? So just let's just briefly discuss the essence of what you should walk away. Copyright protects artistic expressions, it's easy to get. Automatic, in those cases, it might require registration, and you can sue for more money if you're registered, but it's easy, cheap to get and it's global, it's covered all across the world, you get copyright in one country you've got it in another country. So that's beautiful. Many things are excluded under copyright, like derivative works, somebody else can't make another work based on your work. You also have the right to prevent people from making reproductions, and you have the right to stop distribution or performance. These are rights that are excluded under copyright, you retain them as the copyright holder. Can you be sued, the most important thing to remember about that is, first, almost anybody can sue almost anybody for anything. So, the answer to cannot be sued is, of course, you an always be sued for almost anything. More importantly, can I be successfully or profitably sued? Well unless you have a lot of money, it's not worth it to sue you. So you're only going to be sued if you're successful. Corporations can be sued, small business can be sued. Individuals less likely, unless they're trying to stop you from doing something, like suing you for something you've done in an employment situation. And how do you prove it? You only have to be 51% confident. That's all. All right, second module. We talked about limitations, because copyright is very broad, very easy to get, cheap. It's wonderful. But then there's this whole area of fair use, which some people have called the right to copy. You have copyright, and then other people have the right to copy, or the right to violate your copyright. Copyright is simple. Fair use is complicated. Fair use is the part of copyright law that makes everything else difficult. And, what is it? It's a defense. It only applies if you violated copyright and you get sued, then you claim, I have a defense. I have a fair use defense that I can use in court and convince a judge that I should be allowed to have an exception to your copyright. It applies in many situations like education or news reporting or parody, and so there's a number of cases where it does apply. But what's interesting about fair use is it's highly subjective. It's up to a judge whether he thinks this is a use that should be made fair or should be allowed under fair use. And so two judges may disagree as to what is something is fair use, and that creates uncertainty, ambiguity. It creates the potential for problems that you think you have a fair use defense and it doesn't work. Or you think you can attack somebody else's fair use defense and your attack on that defense doesn't work. It's kind of like the weather. You need to be aware that it's hard to control and it's hard to predict accurately. So it's a source of risk, just like interest rates are a source of risk. You don't know what interest rates will be a year from now. You might be able to make a pronouncement, just like somebody can say, I think this is a good fair use defense. That's their opinion. You don't know whether it's true. That's up to the judge. And different judges may judge different ways. Other limitations on copyright were also discussed in our second module. Like for sale doctrine, performance rights limitations, expired copyright is the limitation on your ability to use copyright, and consumer goodwill, which might limit your ability to do something even if the courts say you can. Remember the Sony Rootkit case? Sony won in court, they had a right to do what they do. But they promised never, never to do it again. And they apologized, and they reissued their content. They were right, legally. But they lost in the court of consumer goodwill. Consumers voted with their purses, with their pocketbooks, and they said, we will punish you Sony for doing what we consider to be bad. Even though the court said it's legal, you're going to pay for doing this. Artists said, we won't record with you. Consumers said, we won't buy from you, and Sony said, we're sorry, we're sorry. We know what we did is legal, but we won't ever do it again. Consumer goodwill can limit you in ways that laws do not. Derivative work is an important area of rights under copyright. It's well protected, but it's kind of a little bit complicated. So we gave some examples of that. And of a particular type of derivative work, parody, which derivative works are generally not allowed, unless they're fair use. And the most successful fair use defense, or biggest area of fair use defenses, is anything which is a parody. Well parody doesn't always work, but most of the time, it does. The final area of issue about derivative works is we had a discussion about translation. The short answer on translation is, in most countries, translations are not allowed, that's considered a derivative work. In China, it's referred to as a transformative work. It creates a new market opportunity, it's a new work, and that means, if you care about the China market ever, for your software, your movie, your book, get it translated into Chinese and register it. If you don't do that, someone else might beat you to it, and you may be forever blocked from the China market. Even if your translation's better than someone else's, if they're first to register and you're not, you might get knocked out of that market. And it's a big market. So if you care at all ever about China, get it translated now, whatever you care about, and get it registered. It doesn't have to be a great translation, it just has to be translated. Final module was on protecting software innovations and DMCA. We looked at software and we looked at DMCA, which can be used to protect software, but can also protect music or movies or other forms of entertainment, other forms of copyright protection. DMCA affects anything digital. Software certainly is digital, but DMCA is broader than that. We looked at some case studies that illustrated both software protections and DMCA, and in general, some of the issues like look and feel or employment. In fact, of the three areas of cases, we looked at DMCA to get a better understanding of what that is and why it applied, we looked at look and feel and what is that, what does it mean, how is it protected or not protected, because we looked at some examples of when look and feel may be overcome by fair use, or may be overcome because it's based on something which is not protectable under copyright. And we looked at business software employment issues, such as when you change companies, what are the rights that your former employer has to sue your new employer, because you created something to solve the same problem in the same way, that can get your new company sued and you sued for violation of copyright owned by your former company. Your ideas are not your ideas, if your working for someone, those ideas are solutions or creative output. That belongs to your former employer. Finally, to wrap up, this is part of four courses. I encourage you to take another course in this series, if you haven't already done so. Learn about protecting innovations by a trademark, or a patent, or a strategy. Broaden your understanding and learn how these integrate together to help us protect innovations in business and make money. Thank you. [MUSIC]
