Knowing Enough about Intellectual Property Law to not Lose a Lawsuit
Whatever you do for a living, if you create something original, in any small way, you should know the basics of intellectual property law. If you’re doing any drawing or writing, if you’re lending your voice to recordings, submitting a novel to a publisher, or even designing menus, you should know at least a little bit about intellectual property law.
You wouldn’t know it from talking to someone who’s worked in the entertainment industry all their lives, but you’re probably not going to get ripped off. If you ever, say, self-produce some great music and put it online for free, there’s a chance that some rapper might swipe that song, put a beat behind it, and call it an original work. A much more likely scenario would have you simply being paid royalty fees so as to avoid any legal hassle. Publishers don’t want legal hassle, and they try to avoid it as often as they can. If an artist winds up being ripped off, it’s usually over a misunderstanding or a company oversight, because it’s just not worth it for most companies.
But… that doesn’t mean you should just forget about it. You should absolutely take steps to protect your intellectual property, to know how to defend yourself in court and so on, should it come to that. Anyone who deals in entertainment, literature, art, etcetera, is probably going to face a potential lawsuit sooner or later. If you find success as a novelist, a musician, or even a magazine writer, you’ll be in the public eye, and for some, that makes you fair game for frivolous lawsuits… it also means that someone might have a legitimate case against you if you don’t watch your step.
What You Need to Know
Watch that Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined as such: Unauthorized use or imitation of the language and thoughts of another author, representing said thoughts as one’s original work.
It’s hard to nail that down, really. What one might see as plagiarism, another might see as coincidence. It really depends on the judge, whether or not one work is thought to be similar enough to another to be considered plagiarism. In most cases, you can pretty much get away with anything that you actually did create from an original concept, or at least any work where you altered an existing concept in such a way as to make the two works significantly distinct from one another. It’s really just the big parallels and obvious swipes you need to be careful about. For example, Sergio Leone was sued for taking the plotline of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai “Yojimbo”, putting it into a western, and not changing anything. On the other hand, Quentin Tarantino took the last fifteen minutes of the movie “City on Fire” and extended the plotline into a two hour film, “Reservoir Dogs”, and because he gave the concept his own personal touch, he not only was not sued, but won the admiration of the original film’s director.
On the other hand, there are instances where you can get away with just about anything. In any form of parody, spoof, or satire, for example, the law is basically “anything goes”, with the exception of taking material directly from copyright protected works. If you wanted to make a video of James Bond and Batman dancing to an original song, you’d be fine, as long as it’s obviously a parody, and not a serious work. However, if you made that same video and set it to the song “Surfin’ Bird”, the copyright holders of the song might have a case against you. However, this is kind of murky water, as well, as there have even been documented cases where copyrighted material was allowed to have been used in a spoof.
Protecting your Work
The basics to protecting your own work are much simpler. As soon as you have a finished version of your work that you’re ready to show off to potential publishers, talent agents, etcetera, copyright it right away. You can either have a notary public stamp it for a small fee, or you can snail mail yourself a copy and leave the envelope sealed until it’s time to show a judge.
In the event that publishers are interested in your work, start talking to lawyers as soon as you can. If someone shows you a contract, take it home and do your research before signing it. Any terms you don’t understand, look them up online. If anything at all about the contract doesn’t make sense to you, show the contract to someone you know with a little knowledge in legalese, or look it up yourself.
There’s no guarantee that you won’t ever be sued, or that nobody will ever try to take advantage of you, but by keeping the above tips in mind, you at least won’t be caught with your pants down.
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