Gerald M. Levine, Co-author Rights in Literary Property The United States Copyright Office and many people on social media, particularly on Twitter, have been celebrating the enactment of the first national copyright act in this country that President Washington signed into law on May 31, 1790. The 1790 Act was largely adopted from an earlier […]
Archive | Characters
Authors and Domain Names: Claiming Rights to Personal Names, Characters and Titles
By Gerald M. Levine on March 7, 2015 in Abusive registration, Authors, Characters, Domain name law, Trademarks, UDRP Commentaries
This article first appeared in Independent Publisher. Copyright law is the principal system for protecting authors’ creations. It confers rights without requiring any other action, but in order to fully benefit from the law authors and parties to whom copyrights have been assigned or sold have to record their copyrights with the Copyright Office. Recordation […]
Characters As Protectable Assets Do Not Survive Copyright Termination
By Sheila J. Levine on October 26, 2014 in Authors, Characters, Contracts/Copyright, Copyrightability, Publishing
Co-author Gerald M. Levine Characters as protectable assets do not survive copyright termination of the works in which they appear even though they may continue to live on in works that continue in copyright. All works published prior to January 1, 1923 are in the public domain, a vast repository of cultural wealth available for […]