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Copyright is perhaps one of the most complex areas within Intellectual Property Law, and still it seems so simple. It is one of the areas that are surrounded by much debate, mostly because there is no official copyright registration required to have a piece of work copyrighted.
It is furthermore complicated with musicians covering the songs of other musicians on a regular basis. The questions arises as to whether you have to contact the originators of a music piece and get their permission first before doing a live performance of their music piece.
Then there is the question of copyright infringement. A lecturer places a piece of copyrighted work on the library reserve shelve for students to take out and copy.
Although one person can copy a piece of work for private usage, it is not too say that the work can be made available so that each of the students can copy the particular work for their own private usage.
Yet, more questions exist for example, when an author writes a new book and also makes use of external secondary sources, the author should cite the work properly and provide acknowledgement of the work in the bibliography. Still most books have a copyright statement that says no part of the work may be used in any other work without the written permission of the author.
When will you thus need to get the written permission of the author and will it really be worth your while to pay royalties to someone for using their work as a source of information?
The above and many more questions surrounding copyright can be answered by the experts at Smit & Van Wyk Intellectual Property Lawyers, Pretoria.
Contact us today to help you through the maze of intellectual property issues.
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