Copyright is the
exclusive legal right, given to a creator to copy, print, publish, perform,
film, record, or make derivative works of their creative work, and to authorize
others to do the same. This prevents other people from using someone else’s
creative work (novel, poem, play, song, photograph, painting, movie, software)
without compensating them for the creator’s effort.
The United States
and some other countries do recognize cases where you can use someone else’s
copyrighted work without their permission for limited purposes. This is Fair
use, permitting you to use a minimal portion of their work for such
transformational purposes as criticism, news, education, research, and parody,
such that you are not harming the market for the original work. An example of Fair Use is showing a short clip of a movie during a movie review, or showing
a photograph of a painting in a news report about the painting being auctioned
for a record amount.
Note that words, names,
and titles are not protected by
copyright. After all, it would not be to anyone’s benefit if
you were not legally allowed to say someone else’s name. write down a word they
made up, or display the title of a book without their creator’s permission.
However, words,
names and short phrases (as well as logos) can be protected as trademarks used
to identify commercial products and services — such as “McDonald’s” restaurants
and “Nike” shoes — and you cannot use someone else’s trademark for a
competitive product or service. This is to prevent consumers from being
confused about who actually made that product or performs that service. You can
find out whether someone has registered a word, phrase or logo as a trademark
with the US Patent and Trademark Office through this government website: Search
trademark database. However, to be safe, you should have a trademark attorney search for you, as some people may be using a
trademark without registering it with the USPTO.
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