An Introduction to Copyright

Copyright law grants the author exclusive legal rights to control who may copy, distribute, and modify their work, while prohibiting others from doing so. This right is known as copyright and is also frequently referred to as "intellectual property."

Copyright applies to tangible, original works in the fields of literature, art and science, which also include computer software and documents. However, it typically does not apply to the name of a work, since names do not embody sufficient originality – this falls under trademark law. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with the underlying ideas embodied in a piece of code, since copyright applies only to the expression of ideas, not to ideas themselves – this is more related to patent law.

According to the Berne Convention (of which nearly 200 states are signatories), a work automatically gains copyright the moment it is fixed in a tangible form. Thus, when a developer publishes their software or documents without a specific license, these works are under strict copyright restrictions by default, and are not assumedly in the public domain. Additionally, authors may register copyright for their work, but such registration is not for the purpose of obtaining rights (as they are automatically acquired), but rather to publicly record the copyright ownership for legal purposes, such as ensuring smooth enforcement or transfers.

You must have seen the phrase "All Rights Reserved." By strict copyright restrictions, it means literally what the phrase means: all rights are vested in the author, and without permission, nothing can be done with their work, including but not limited to unauthorized copying, redistributing, or modifying. While there are a few exceptions to those restrictions (referred to as "fair use"), they do not come close to granting you the "four freedoms" associated with software or documents. Typically, the limits of fair use are confined to limited quoting of text and distribution of works often under Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on a small-scale basis.

According to the Berne Convention, the copyright laws of its member states must ensure that the term of a work's copyright covers the author's lifetime plus an additional 50 years. This means that a work enters the public domain at least 50 years after the author's death. In fact, in many countries (including US, Japan, EU and UK), the copyright of a natural person expires 70 years after their death.

As mentioned earlier, copyright law imposes restrictions on software by default, preventing its free modification and redistribution. Thus, in order to grant users the rights to do so, developers need to license their software. If you want to learn more about it, proceed to study An Introduction to Software Licensing.

It is worth of note that "licensing," as we mentioned earlier, is not the same thing as transfer of copyright. Licensing a piece of software simply means that the rights have been granted to another party, and the licensor has not lost the software's copyright. If the copyright of the software is transferred to another party, then the copyright holder of the software shifts from the licensor to that party. If you want to learn more about copyright management, read Copyright Management and License Compatibility in a Remixed Work; but before doing so, you may want to study the basis of software licensing first.