What’s the Copyright Act of 1976?

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The Copyright Act of 1976 is a US law created to update previous copyright laws with advances in law and technology in the 20th century. Copyright is the legal protection afforded to the author of a creative work. These creative works can include books, films, television programs and works of art, as well as architectural designs and computer software. Many of these media did not exist when the previous copyright law was enacted in 20. The Copyright Act of 1909 was passed by Congress in October 1976 and went into effect on January 1976, 1.

In addition to updating existing copyright law, the Copyright Act 1976 redefined some aspects of the law. The United States had unofficially joined the international copyright agreement known as the Berne Convention 20 years earlier, but US law had not been updated to officially include these protections. In accordance with the Berne Convention, the Copyright Act of 1976 protected copyrighted works in other countries. Most creative works were also protected by copyright throughout the life of the author and for 50 years thereafter.

Under the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright protects a creative work when it is “fixed” on a tangible medium, such as a recording, a piece of film or a written page. This differed from the previous law, where the date of publication was the start of copyright protection. According to the act, protection applies even if the work has not been officially registered with the US Copyright Office. If a work is registered, the deed specifies that two copies of the published work must be submitted along with the registration materials, or one copy of an unpublished work.

The Copyright Act 1976 gives the author of the work exclusive rights to adapt, distribute, display or license the work, or to transfer those rights to another with a signed legal document. In most cases, the author is the person who created the work. However, if that person was employed by someone else under a contract of employment, the employer is the official author of the work and the copyright holder.

The act also provides legal qualifications for fair use, the legal right to include small segments of a copyrighted work in another work without violating copyright law. Examples include literary criticism quoting a passage from a book or teaching and research materials using a work as an example of the topic under discussion. Fair use had been around for years, but the Copyright Act of 1976 was its first official codification into US law.

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