types of works within each category. Can you think of a type of work within each category?
- Literary, artistic, musical, and dramatic works
- Translations, adaptations, arrangements, and alterations of literary, artistic, and musical works
- Collections of literary and artistic works[1]
- Additionally, depending on the country, original works of authorship may also include, among others:
- Applied art and industrial designs and models
- Computer software
What are the exclusive rights granted?
Creators who have copyright have exclusive rights to control certain uses of their works by others, such as the following (note that other rights may exist depending on the country):
- to make copies of their works
- to publicly perform and communicate their works to the public, including via broadcast
- to make adaptations and arrangements of their works (Adaptations can include translations.)
This means that if you own the copyright to a particular book, no one else can copy or adapt that book without your permission (with important caveats, which we will get to later in section 2.3 “Global Aspects of Copyright”). Keep in mind that there is an important difference between being the copyright holder of a novel and controlling how a particular authorized copy of the novel is used. While the copyright owner owns the exclusive rights to make copies of the novel, the person who owns a particular physical copy of that novel can generally do what they want with it, such as loan it to a friend or sell it to a used bookstore.
One of the exclusive rights of copyright is the right to adapt a work. An adaptation (or a “derivative work,” as it is sometimes called) is a new work based on a preexisting work. In some countries, the term derivative work is used to describe changes that include but are not limited to “adaptations” as described in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which uses both of these terms in different articles. For the purposes of this book and for understanding how CC licenses and public domain tools work, the terms derivative work and adaptation are interchangeable and denote a work
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