HAVE
you ever uploaded an image or a video to a website, only for it to be deleted
because of copyright issues? While some areas of copyright law can be
complicated enough to cause copyright lawyers sleepless nights, the basics are
very simple. Armed with some simple principles, you can save yourself from
running afoul of copyright law.
Steps
1.
Understand the scope of copyright law. It does protect literary works,
paintings, photographs, drawings, films, music (and its lyrics), choreography,
sculptures and many other things. It generally doesn't protect the underlying
ideas, and it does not protect facts. For example, copyright doesn't prevent
you from expressing in your own words ideas and facts found in a book or
journal you read (but you should always give appropriate credit to the sources
in which you found them; it is common courtesy to do so, and not doing so could
be plagiarism).
