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Julie Feighery
Copyright
Copyright refers to laws to protect the works and the rights of authors. These laws determine how or if someone else’s protected work can be legally copied, shared, performed, reused, or modified. Copyright infringement means copying or distributing someone else’s copyrighted material without permission. As soon as you create something that is your own work, such as a short story you’ve written or a video, you hold that work’s copyright in the United States.
Copyright can also be sold or licensed to another person or company, who then has control over what happens to the copyrighted content. For example, authors are often required to sign over their copyright upon publication, effectively handing over the rights to the companies that publish their work. This model enables publishers to charge outrageously high prices for journals, books, and textbooks. This is also why you cannot stream the tv series you like on every platform, and why Nintendo doesn’t let you livestream their video games.
Public domain
- Materials that are not copyrighted: Published US government documents are, by design, never copyrighted because they are meant to be open to all. For example, transcripts of congressional hearings are government documents, as are images from NASA, and the data from the US Census. Other materials that cannot be copyrighted include simple mathematical equations and food recipes.
- Materials whose copyright has expired: Books published 95 years ago or longer in the US are another example of public domain materials. Their copyright protection has simply expired. The original intent of copyright law was to protect an author’s rights of redistribution and sales, but authors of works published so long ago are probably not alive anymore. Thus the need to protect that author’s profits is also gone.
Does this mean that you can copy content from a US government website, such as an image from NASA, without asking for permission? Yes, you can!
Can you use it in an assignment without citing the source? No, that would be plagiarism. It’s important to always credit the source, regardless of whether or not it is in the public domain.
You can find a lot of public domain works on the internet using tools like Google Books and searching for works published 95 years ago or earlier. The Internet Archive is another good source of public domain books, films, and other materials. If you don’t know whether something is copyrighted, it is best to assume everything you find online is copyrighted unless you find an explicit statement indicating otherwise.
Source
“Copyright” from Library 160: Introduction to College-Level Research Copyright © 2021 by Iowa State University Library Instruction Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
