damages and other remedies permitted by applicable law, including statutory provisions that award legal fees in some circumstances.
LICENSING AND TRANSFER
Many creators and copyright holders need help to fully exercise their exclusive rights or simply give others permission to exercise the rights granted by copyright law. Several options exist to do this. Some creators choose to license some or all of their rights, either exclusively or nonexclusively. Others choose to sell their rights outright and allow others to exercise them in their place, sometimes in exchange for royalty payments. There are often formalities associated with the sale or licensing of copyrights, including when a copyright license must be in writing, depending on the copyright law that applies.
TERMINATION OF COPYRIGHT TRANSFERS AND LICENSES
The laws of some countries grant copyright holders the right to terminate transfer agreements or licenses even if the transfer agreement or license doesn’t allow it. In the United States, for example, copyright law provides two mechanisms for doing so, depending on when the transfer agreement or license became effective. For more information on these rights and a tool that allows creators and copyright holders to figure out if they have those rights, see https://rightsback.org.
OTHER GENERAL RESOURCES ON COPYRIGHT
- “CopyrightX,” by Harvard Law School.
- This is a course on copyright provided by the Harvard Law School’s HarvardX distance learning initiative: http://copyx.org/; http://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/copyrightx.
- U.S. Copyright Office, Circular no. 1, “Copyright Basics:” https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf.
- “Copyright for Educators & Librarians,” by Coursera. All rights reserved.
- This is a course on copyright provided by Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/copyright-for-education.
MORE ON PHILOSOPHIES OF COPYRIGHT
- “Philosophy of Copyright,” Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_copyright. CC BY-SA 3.0.
