Copyright infringement occurs on a daily basis. Statistically speaking, you've probably infringed on someone's copyrights at some point in your life. Read on to learn more about types of infringement and some possible exceptions.
Find out more about Copyrights
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by River Braun, J.D.
River Braun was a business attorney in California for over a decade, assisting entrepreneurs on issues such as incorp...
Updated on: July 30, 2024 · 3 min read
Copyright laws protect original creative works, such as music, art, and literature, that are fixed in some kind of tangible medium. No matter the medium—book, canvas, digital file, etc.—or official publication, copyright laws protect these works from infringement.
As a creator, you have exclusive rights to distribute, copy, modify, perform, and display your works as you see fit. If anyone else takes your work and does any of these things, then they may be infringing on your copyrights. In order to prove infringement, you must demonstrate substantial similarity between your work and theirs and that they had access to your originals.
Also, as a creator, you likely receive inspiration from others and could unintentionally violate copyright laws. If you're a blogger or own a website where you publish lots of content and images, for example, you could be liable for infringement even if:
In addition to direct copyright infringement, someone may also be guilty of contributory infringement if they knowingly induced or assisted someone else in using your material. Remember Napster? In perhaps the most famous case of its kind, the U.S. District Court in San Francisco held that Napster's music-sharing service constituted contributory infringement by knowingly allowing its users to trade protected music.
Image and text copyright are two common types of infringement. The moment you create an original image, whether it's a selfie or a majestic landscape, you automatically own the rights to that image. With the proliferation of image sharing on the internet, it is common for others to take those images and use them for their own purposes. In too many of those cases, they are infringing on your image copyrights.
Like images, the moment you write a novel, a poem, or a blog article, you have copyright protections. As such, you have the exclusive right to distribute, copy, perform, or otherwise use that text. When it comes to content published on the internet, text copyright infringement can run rampant because it's so easy to just copy and paste the text.
There are exceptions to copyright infringement laws and things you can do to avoid unauthorized use of someone else's material, including the following:
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