Bhat's Notes

Copyrights attorney. UOV under grad in finance and marketing. I am in property law over 20 years. I helped few Startups. I am a startup myself. I have lawyers that work for me.

India and USA got similar roots. We both got colonized by British. No copyrights till 1600. No printing. Printer is the one who hand writes one copy at a time. Later printing press came. Then people got concerned that copy right infringement works. King decided that he must suppress speech against the religion. He authorized printers with certain content. In 1710, king passed a rule that protects the author. Right to control printing of their works is in the hands of the authors. India in 1952 signed up for Barnes’ convention and chose not to copy the content of the world for free unlike USA.

Create your own system or let the common rules govern th e game.

Copyright is country specific.

Laws at the convention are nebulous and flexible.

US order have long ancient history like India and hence they used existing system as is.

Idea is in head is not acceptable. It has to be fixated. Fixed means work exits. Fixated means it got to be original. Originality means original to the author. It doesn’t have to be unique.

Once you created some thing, you have a right to sell. In Germany, author can only license, but not sell his work. License is like loaning your car.

Have a contract jn copyright as you get to say what you want.

I’m the olden days, people have white pages (companies) and yellow pages (people). There is no creativity in copying this data. The company that copied could get copyright.

Facts are not protected.

Copyright includes all the human creativity that is fixated. There are exceptions too.

Idea are not protected by law. There is nothing that can protect the idea owner. If you are going to share something, have an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). NDA is important and it gets you respect. Americans like it.

Anyone’s boat needs to have a bottom. Aspects of creativity that get added to the boat are protected.

Statutory damages are available in USA. File with copyright office in USA and take a demand letter through an attorney and give it to the offender. The recipient of the letter will respond. You can do this without doing any registration of copyright of your work.

After the protection period is over, public can use that knowledge from copyright office.

USA: Life of author + 70 years

If I hire someone to be a programmer in USA, companies owns the copyright. If someone is going to create something for you, better have an agreement in place.

Facts, basic facts and things in public place aren’t protected.

Fair use: Courts go through laborious review on infringement.

1) Nature of underlying work (factual?), creative (more protected)

2) Amount of works taken, both qualitative and quantitative. Owners of the original band sued the band that copied the song in the name of parody work. Opinions can differ. Taking the heart of the song is clear infringement.

Fees are $40 per copyright work.

Go to US copyright office for more information. Go to ypo.org.

The terms and conditions you accept when you sign in to an app or Facebook give rights to Facebook.

Patent gets.more complex. You need to be at least an engineer to file a patent. Patent officer looks for

1) Usefulness

2) Non-obvious

3) Patentable?

Life of the parent is 20 years. Life of a copyright is life plus 70 years. If you are a small business, having a copyright instantly helps as a lawyer can take case as they csn get the fees from the bad guys.

It is few hundred dollars as opposed to $40K and it gives you time of one year to file the fill patent.

Whether you filed a patent or not, get a lawyer quickly. Lot miss the boat on patent filing.

Unless you protect in a country, you can’t stop infringement in that country.

Patent where your beat market is. Where your lifetime or likelihood of revenues come from. If you deal with other countries, make sure your lawyer is aware about the context of the country. Certain country has right to take copyrights away from you before even you get there.