The term copyright encapsulates the bundle of legal rights that have been granted to authors over their original creations. Broadly speaking, copyright extends to original creations that take the form of literary, musical and artistic works; the composition of rights varies depending upon the form which the original work takes. The bundle of rights can be further understood as economic and moral protections accorded to authors. [1] Economic rights protect the economic value of a copyrighted work [2] and, for instance, allows for the prevention of the reproduction of a copyrighted work without the author’s permission. Additionally, moral rights allow authors to take certain actions to preserve and protect their link with their work and, for instance, provides authors the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously. [3]
What do we understand by the term copyright?
TERM
EXPLANATION
Copyright
A collective right which gives people from various fields the sole rights to recreate or reproduce their own work into areas of translation and for the public opinion.
Work of joint authorship
A work created collaboratively by two or more authors, without prejudice to the contribution of any author.
Classes of works for which copyrights protection is available in India
Original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works
Cinematograph films
Audio recordings
Artistic work
A painting, a sculpture, a drawing (including a diagram, map, chart or plan), an engraving or a photograph, whether or not any such work possesses artistic quality;
A work of architecture; and
Any other work of artistic craftsmanship.
Musical work
A work consisting of music, including any graphical notation of such work. This does not include any words or any action intended to be sung, spoken or performed with the music. A musical work need not be written down to enjoy copyright protection.
Sound recording
A recording of sounds, regardless of the medium of recording or production.
Cinematograph film
Any visual recording regardless of medium, through a variety of means. The protected work also includes any audio recording accompanying such visuals.
Government work
A work which is made or published by or under the direction or control of
The government or any department of the government
Any legislature in India, as well as
Any court, tribunal or other judicial authority in India.
Indian work
A literary, dramatic or musical work,
The author of which is a citizen of India; or
Which is first published in India; or
The author of which, in the case of an unpublished work is, at the time of the making of the work, a citizen of India.
Before uploading any literary work, image, video, or any other material to Wikimedia Commons, you need to check if it comes under the category of free licenses in both countries: the country of publication, as well as the country in which the server is being hosted.
To check whether the work is under Public domain in India, you need to find out whether it complies with The Indian Copyright Act, 1957[4], which states
Anonymous works, photographs, cinematographic works, sound recordings, government works, and works of corporate authorship or of international organizations enter the public domain 60 years after the date on which they were first published, counted from the beginning of the following calendar year (i.e. as of 2018, works published prior to 1 January 1964 are considered public domain).
Posthumous works (other than those above) enter the public domain after 60 years from publication date.
Any other kind of work enters the public domain 60 years after the author’s death. Works by authors who died before 1941 entered public domain after 50 years and copyright has not been restored.
Text of any matter which has been published in any Official Gazette, any Act of a Legislature, any judgement or order of any judicial authority, any government reports which has been laid on the Table of the Legislature are free from copyright, unless the the reproduction or publication of such is prohibited by concerned authority.
To check whether the book is in the public domain in the United States of America, you need to find if
It was published or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office before January 1, 1929;
It was first published in India and not published in the U.S. within 30 days;
It was first published before 1 March 1989 without copyright notice or before 1964 without copyright renewal or before India established copyright relations with the United States it was in the public domain in India on the Uruguay Round Agreements. Act date i.e. 1 January 1996.
