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Pink Floyd Maintains Right to Keep Concept Albums Intact
Pink Floyd, through a combination of Moral Rights and contractual provisions, can prohibit record companies from selling individual songs from its popular concept albums according to a London Court.
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Fair Use Ruling Overturned on Appeal
Last year I wrote an article about Gaylord v. U.S., a case involving a U.S. postal stamp that incorporated a photograph of a sculpture from the Korean War Memorial in Washington D.C. The sculptor (Frank Gaylord) sued for copyright infringement and initially lost with the trial court ruling that the stamp's depiction of the sculpture constituted transformative fair use and was therefore allowed under copyright law. Today a federal appeals court majority held that the stamp was not a fair use of the sculpture and remanded the case to the trial court for an assessment of damages. Records show that the government grossed over $17 Million on sales of the stamp, so damages could be substantial.
First Steps: Using Copyright to protect your work
According to copyright law, you are a creative artist.
For some of you, this isn’t news—you may already think of yourself as an artist of some sort, maybe a copywriter, a photographer, or a graphic designer. Some of you even make a living from your work. But copyright law doesn’t care; it treats the crayon scribblings of my 2-year old exactly the same as the latest David Hockney painting. If you write a blog, sketch on a napkin, take a vacation snapshot, or author some Javascript code then you’re covered under the law.
Of course, nobody’s going to confuse my son’s drawings with a Hockney (he’s more of a Pollack), but copyright law leaves it to the marketplace to determine the relative value of creative works. The law itself grants equal protection to all creations, from a short video captured on a cell phone to the latest Steven Speilberg film, or from a simple blog post to the next J.K. Rowling novel.
If you already think of yourself as an artist, you may have a rough concept about what rights you get under copyright law (although you probably haven’t looked much at specifics). But even if you don’t directly profit from your work, you should still learn what rights you are afforded under the law.