In the context of a blog, with lots of posts from different years, how would copyright apply? Would each post on the blog have a separate copyright? Or would the blog have a copyright as a whole? Or is it up to the author how it should work?
Say I added a footer to the bottom of my blog in the year 2005, which reads:
Copyright © 2005 by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.
(Please note that the copyright notices in this post are purely for discussion and illustrative purposes, and are not intended to state the true copyrighted nature of any of the content on this website.)
Now, it’s the year 2009, so there seems to be two popular ways to update this kind of line:
- Copyright © 2005-2009 by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.
- Copyright © 2009 by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.
So in the latter one, the copyright date is simply bumped up to 2009. Is it legal to arbitrarily bump the copyright expiration date like that without formal renewal?
In Australia, this is not a problem, as copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death — it has nothing to do with the publication date. In which case, it does not make sense to add a year to copyright declarations of Australian works. I think the following would do fine for me:
Copyright © by Jeremy Visser. All rights reserved.
It would then be up to somebody to look up the date of my death to find out if any of my works are in the public domain.
So why do we add dates to copyright notices? In the United States, the case is the same as Australia — copyright expires 70 years after the death of an author.
I could not find any information on how copyright expiration applies to a corporation in Australia (after all, a corporation cannot die), but in the United States, copyright on a work produced by somebody as part of their official duties while working for a corporation expires 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation (whichever is shorter). In this case, adding dates to copyright notices does make sense.
So, it seems to me that the reason we all add dates to our copyright notices is because we are all sheep and simply copy each others’ copyright notices. Ironic, eh?
It isn’t a valid copyright notiv *without* the year, even though the year is irrelevant in Australia for prose (but is not irrelevant for images, photographs or sound recordings, amongst others). The order is important, too: it has to be “Copyright”, then “(C)” (and it must be an uppercase C) or the circle-uppercase-C symbol (and *hope* the plagiarist doesn’t switch the charset encoding to make it gibberish), then the year, then the legal name of the copyright holder. There is mountains of case law about this, and lawyers are more pedantic than coders when given the chance. The “70 years after death” rule actually extends to the 31-Dec following the 70th anniversary of the author’s death (case law, again). Works authored before 1-May-1955 are actually death+50, because the copyright extension Act could only be applied to works still in copyright as of 1-May-2005, no grandfather clause.
Interesting. I should also note that in US law, the (C) is not valid as a copyright symbol — the real one © must be used.
Since upon completion, works have an automatic copyright, is it even necessary at all to state the copyright? It should be assumed that (unless otherwise stated) the work is copyrighted.
That’s absolutely true — I forgot to mention that in my post. I guess in some cases you would be better off not adding a copyright notice at all.
“I apologise to this court, your Honor, for my unintentional copyright infringement, but I made all reasonable attempts to determine whether the work was in copyright, or its copyright had expired, or was in the Public Domain. But as there was no evidence as to the identity of the author, I naturally assumed the work had been deliberately placed into the Public Domain. If I had been able to locate the author I would have obtained a license as a matter of course.”
Well, in that case, assuming a work is public domain just because there is no copyright notice is a silly assumption.
The person in your hypothetical example would definitely be convicted of copyright infringement.
It’s not that simple. “All reasonable efforts” is actually a legitimate defence.
I have personally done copyright searches, *with* a name, and came up blank… how much harder would it have been *without* a name? The work was published in 1914, which makes it death+50 (works pre-1911 are publication+42), and the author’s estate could conceivably still come after me for infringement, depending on when the author died (no obituary found, either). My lawyer’s advice was to assume the copyright had expired, and plead “all reasonable efforts” as a defence, should the need ever arise. Multiple jurisdictions are involved, which makes it even hairier.
Copyright hangs around for a very long time (some say too long) and you must consider “orphaned” works when wrestling with copyright issues. In 2081, how will a user of your copyrighted work know whether its copyright has expired? How will they know you died in a horrible car accident 26-Jan-2009, and copyright thus expired 31-Dec-2079, especially if you don’t put your name on it?
That jogged my memory, there is gotcha for not putting your name on it…
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s34.html
COPYRIGHT ACT 1968 – SECT 34
Duration of copyright in anonymous and pseudonymous works
(1) Subject to subsection (2), if the first publication of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is anonymous or pseudonymous, any copyright subsisting in the work by virtue of this Part continues to subsist until the end of the period of 70 years after the end of the calendar year in which the work was first published.
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply in relation to a work if, at any time before the end of the period referred to in that subsection, the identity of the author of the work is generally known or can be ascertained by reasonable inquiry.
Why not using a Creative Commons license instead of “All Right Reserved?” There’s a handy wizard to help you pick which license is best for you at http://creativecommons.org/license/
Oh, this is purely out of interest — I’m actually not interested in the copyright status of my blog. I was just using it as a hypothetical example in place of the many other occurances I’ve seen around the ‘net.
But that reminds me — maybe I should add a CC license to my blog somewhere.