Scholarly Communication and Publishing
Table of Contents
This section of the LibGuide goes over how to create and find specific kinds of digital materials. It is divided into subpages that are focused on a particular kind of material. These subpages include:
Copyright and Digital Works
Copyright protection applies to minimally creative works that are fixed in a tangible medium (written down, recorded, typed, photographed). Protection is automatic and lasts, for works created today, for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years (or, for works of corporate authorship for 120 years from the date of creation). Authors automatically own exclusive rights in their creative works to: reproduce, distribute, create derivative works, publicly display and publicly perform their works. Authors do not waive any rights if they fail to put a copyright notice on the work or put their work on the internet. Authors do not need to register their work with the copyright office to have copyright protection: it is automatic.
A caveat to general rules of copyright ownership is that any and all rights in copyright can be transferred or waived by contract. For instance, although fair use is a general exception to copyright when quoting a small portion of a work, if I write a journal article and transfer all of my exclusive rights in copyright to a publisher, I no longer have any fair use rights to my own work (note that these rights for academic authors, at least, are often restored in good library license agreements). Digital objects are much more likely than physical ones to carry some sort of terms of use. Terms of use on websites are also contracts that may be enforced by courts. It is a good idea to consider whether any contractual limitations to copyright exist before assuming that fair use limitations on the rights of authors remains in place.