Understanding copyright at a glance

Maybe we will not realize even in slightest idea that copyright is omnipresence, it literally  incorporates and integrates into our daily life. When listening to some songs or even while reading a book, we are interacting with the copyright of someone works. Copyright grants a set of exclusive rights, economic and moral rights, to creators or copyright holders to adapt, copy, distribute, display, and translate their creations. Copyright grants automatically when the creator has created work that originally originates from their ideas. It does not protect facts or ideas, just expression of the ideas. The works will be protected for a long period of time in accordance with applicable copyright law. However, the protection is balanced against other public interests.

There are two primary rationales for copyright law, utilitariana and author's rights. The utilitarian's purposes is to incentivize creators from their works and the author's rights serves to recognize and protect the deep connection between authors and their creative works. The author's rights foundation is coming from moral rights, it is ensuring the attribution for the author's works. and preserve the works' integrity. 

While it will be vary per country basis, there is a general list of copyrighted works, it spans from written, visual, audio to combination of those three kind of forms.  

• Literary works

• Musical works

• Artistic works or works of visual art

• Dramatic works

• Cinematographic works (including audiovisual works)

• Translations, adaptations, arrangements of literary, and artistic works

• Collections of literary and artistic works,

• Databases

• Computer software

Economic rights grants the copyright holder a set of exclusive rights to control certain uses of their works. The general rights below are applicable in most countries.

• Making copies of their works (right of reproduction)

• Publicly performing and communicating their works to the public, including via broadcast

• Making adaptations, such as translations of their works as well as changes to the arrangements of their works

Copyright is only one of intellectual property (IP) laws. There are two more well-known IP laws that usually be mentioned when discussing copyright, they are trademark law and patent laws. Trademark law generally protects the brand and its reputation, it supposes to make the public not being confused the source of goods and services from the brands that they have been used. On the other hand, patent laws gives the inventors a time-limited monopoly to their inventions. 

Although copyright protects the works, there are generally two approaches in which exceptions and limitations into copyright law. The first approach is by listing specific activities that are excluded from the reach of copyright and the second is to include more flexible guidelines by the courts about what is allowed.  The later approach, or fair use doctrine, is designed so that the rights of the general public are not completely restricted by copyright. Fair use allows the public to still be able to use a work in a limited way for some purposes, such as education. In the United States, the determination of fair use is based on four reasons:

1. The purpose and character of your use

2. The nature of the copyrighted work

3. The amount and substantiality of the portion taken,

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market. 

Fair use exist so that the rights of the general public are not completely restricted by copyright by permitting the use of copyrighted works without permission and royalties to the creator, such as research, work criticism, news broadcasts. Besides fair use, there is another form of limitation on the exclusive rights of copyright holders, named  compulsory licensing scheme. This scheme is intended for the use of a copyrighted work by the public without asking permission from the creator, however the user should pay a fee to the copyright holder.

We have been discussed a lot about the copyrighted works, now let us discuss about the freely use and not subject to copyright. Those works are under public domain and CC0. There are several reasons why some works are under public domain:

• Copyright has expired. The standard of the Berne Convention is 50 years after the author's death except for photographic and cinematographic works.

• The work has never been subject to copyright protection. In Indonesia, works that enter the public domain are the results of open meetings of state institutions, statutory regulations, state speeches or speeches by government officials, court decisions or appointments of judges and holy books or religious symbols.

• The creator dedicates their works to the public before the copyright protection period ends, for example by using CC0.

• Copyright holder faisl to comply with legal requirements regarding their copyrighted works.