News: Copyright

The Copyright Advocacy Committee is gearing up for Copyright Awareness Week 2022, which kicks off on Monday, April 25. What is Copyright? Copyright is to writers what patents are to inventors. When you create original written material, whether it’s a play, musical, libretto, lyric, or song, you automatically own that copyright. Your work is protected by your copyright, which is what gives you the ability to negotiate...

What Happens if I Make a Mistake When Registering My Copyright? On February 24th, the Supreme Court issued a decision in the Unicolors v. H&M case which will help allay one of the fears many of our members have when submitting an application for copyright registration: making a mistake! For a little background, Unicolors sued H&M for copyright infringement. H&M sought to invalidate Unicolors’ copyright...

January 1, 2022 was Public Domain Day, the day each year when copyrights expire and new works enter the public domain. The “Progress Clause” of the U.S. Constitution established the legal basis for federal copyright law, and it did so in order to encourage the progress of our society, to incentivize the creation of new works that would eventually enrich the public ​domain and be accessible to everyone. So each work entering the public domain is an example of...

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (the CASE Act) was signed into law in 2020, with the support of the Dramatists Guild. It establishes a small claims court-type tribunal within the United States Copyright Office that allows copyright owners (like dramatists) to bring claims in a less expensive and more efficient way.  The Case Act allows the Copyright Office to establish a Copyright Claims Board (the “CCB”) that can hear infringement claims up to $30,...

January 1, 2021 was Public Domain day. On that historic date, many new titles entered the public domain, including works by literary luminaries that had all been copyrighted in 1925; that copyright has now expired. The works in question include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Alain Locke's The New Negro, which features essays by Zora Neal Hurston...

#DGuknow that Tom Lehrer's lyrics are now all in the public domain? The songwriter Tom Lehrer recently posted on his website that "all the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner. whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or payment to me or to anyone else." The Dramatists Guild supports a robust public domain, especially...