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Written by : Gerard Roethel |
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intellectual property is really really important to everyone in this room why content is king you all know from your membership associations there's been an enormous shift in the United States and owning the words on the page owning copyright or having a good license in what you're using is crucial to running your nonprofit organization you know I've been doing this a long time and when i first started acting as a lawyer for nonprofits antitrust law was the big thing everyone lived in fear of antitrust and then was taxed and then was employment law for the last 15 years or so it's been intellectual property law and the reason for that is simple the rise of the Internet everyone is stealing everybody else's stuff my non-traffic clients are taking things and using them that don't belong to them others are taking things that belong to my clients and using them without permission and it creates lots of nasty legal battles my clients have paid out more for copyright infringement over the last 15 years than for any other source of liability including IRS audits ninety-eight percent of copyright law is summarized thusly and I will fold my hands as I say it because you'll see it has a nice religious ring to it mmm everything belongs to its creator we're talking about the person who creates the words on the page or the image or who speaks the words out loud all that stuff belongs to the guy or gal who creates it if you remember that simple son's everything belongs to its creator and you use that as your guide post as you're considering what you can use so so then you follow it up with the the second part of that and you can't be using it without permission we said they're owned by the creator and you can't be using them without permission so the Creator he has a bundle of rights in that work and two of those important rights are only the Creator can authorize copies of that work and only the Creator can authorize derivative works I want to pause on each of those concepts because this is where my clients get into trouble even if they think to themselves okay i know i don't own this photograph but it's probably okay for me to use it no it probably isn't okay for you to use it I said that there were two important things that the copyright holder got to do with his or her property one of them was controlled the right to make copies and display those copies the second is to create derivative works a derivative work is something where you start with the first work and you change it in some way and create a different sort of work from it I call this the eighth grader problem if any of you are parents you know that your children know how to download things from the internet and then they change it a little and then they turn it in as their homework I myself had my son sitting at the computer one day saying to me Mom how much of this article from the Encyclopedia Britannica do you think I need to change so the teacher will think I wrote it myself so then I proceeded to explain copyright law to him honey no matter how much you changed that article it's still going to belong to the Encyclopedia Britannica it's a derivative work and you don't have permission so getting copyright assignments is crucial and it's particularly crucial when you've got more than one volunteer working on the same work product which brings us to joint ownership what's the deal with joint ownership so you got a committee writing a set of guidelines they jointly owned that and they they owned undivided parts in it and they each have the right to go out and use that now you've got a nightmare scenario as one of my clients did recently for people worked on a work product they didn't think to get the copyright assignment until after the committee finished its work then they went to the committee members and said by the way we need you to sign this copyright assignment well by then one of the committee members had realized this was a valuable work product and he said nope not going to sign it over the other three signed it over the fourth one refused to sign which meant that the fourth one could take this take their work product put it on his own website use it in any way he wanted to because he had an ownership interest in the entire document not just his words now he had a duty to account for the profits he didn't want to sell it he just wants to put it on his own website which makes it pretty worthless to the Association if it's up on other people's websites they want to have it behind the number firewall and it's a value to the members and so on they couldn't get that fourth owner we had to start from scratch use a different set of people come up with a different work product and make sure that those pieces of paper were signed up front this is important stuff it's not that complicated the subtleties get a little complicated but the basic principle that you don't own it if you didn't write it or one of your w-2 employees didn't write it Oh before I claws pause for questions let me just emphasize this bit about why do I keep saying W to employees because one of the ways my clients get into the most trouble is they forget that independent contractors that they're paying on a 1099 they don't automatically on their stuff it belongs to the independent contractor it's got to be a w-2 employee for it to belong to the employer or you have to get a copyright assignment you
Thanks for your comment Yulanda Siverly, have a nice day.
- Gerard Roethel, Staff Member
Thanks for this interesting article
Thanks Velda your participation is very much appreciated
- Gerard Roethel
About the author
I've studied arachnology at Texas A&M International University in Laredo and I am an expert in comparative sociology. I usually feel blissful. My previous job was postman I held this position for 24 years, I love talking about vacation and diabolo. Huge fan of Ellen Page I practice wrestling and collect radio premiums.
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