If three people own a copyright, then each of them has a right to act independently. They don’t have to agree in order to sue someone.
I was meaning it in the sense of Chablis comes from the northern part of the region, and classic red Bourgogne comes from the rest of the region, so as not to confuse people overly.
Can someone explain what the story was with the first American edition of Lord of the Rings? The three volumes came out with no copyright notice (my wife bought them and we still own them) and then another publisher (Ballantine, IIRC) published it without asking permission from or paying royalties to Tolkien. I think they eventually pay him something. But this seems to violate all that is said above about copyright inhering as soon as the work is written. Is it because Tolkien was not American?
To the poster who mentioned his father’s scientific works, I will say that generally speaking, any published work is copyrighted by the publisher. Some time in the mid to late 80s, the publisher didn’t ask the authors. Then they started asking. From the mid 90s, I signed all the copyright agreements with a handwritten addition giving me the right to post my papers on my own web site. With one exception, the publisher always agreed. For that one exception, I withdrew the paper and published it elsewhere. The online journal I helped found and still help edit asks its authors only for a one-time publication licence.
There was one case whose legality I am still a little confused about. It was a three author paper that was never published by a commercial publisher but rather printed by the McGill printing service and contained no copyright notice. It was out of print and a number of people wanted it reprinted and were willing to help retype it. One of the authors was my colleague and he enthusiastically agreed. The other two were American. I wrote to one and he readily agreed. The third had died and, AFAIK, so had his wife. He had a daughter and, try as I might, I could not track her down. We went ahead and did it. It can still be downloaded from my web site. No one has objected.
It’s because it was published before January 1, 1978, before the United States started harmonizing its law with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886. So, the operative law would be the Copyright Act of 1909.
The Berne Convention does not allow “formalities” for copyright protection. The United States resisted this for a long time, because U.S. policymakers wanted registration to be a mandatory requirement for copyright protection.
The Copyright Act of 1976 ended registration as a requirement for copyright protection. However, it preserved the requirement that a claim of copyright be registered before the copyright owner can sue for infringement.
There are other members of the Berne Convention who don’t like this and believe that the United States is failing to comply with the terms of the convention by still requiring registration before filing a lawsuit.
But the United States has somewhat reduced the opposition by only imposing this requirement on U.S. works. So the owner of a copyright in a non-U.S. work doesn’t have to register before suing. However, that owner might still have to register to be eligible for statutory damages, attorneys’ fees, and costs.
Generally when you publish an academic paper, you assign the copyright to the publisher. At least that’s the case in my field. There may be stipulations that the paper must be free to distribute to classes and things like that.
I think that might work? Works created by the US government, or by agents of the US government acting in their official capacity as such, are explicitly not copyrighted (this means, for instance, that imagery from NASA missions is all public domain, and there was a striking photo of a forest fire making the rounds a while back taken by a US Forest Service firefighter). But I don’t know if that means that the US government can’t own a copyright, or that one transferred to the US government would lose its copyright status. Or maybe it means that any transfer of a copyright to the US government is invalid, though that would raise questions if a copyright holder with no identifiable kin were to die intestate.
I wonder if German’s™ Chocolate Cake counts
I see you inserted a trademark symbol, but do you know for sure that any trademark rights were ever asserted in that name? Just because an item is named after a person or a company doesn’t mean that there was an assertion of trademark rights in the name of the product. In any case, the Wikipedia article shows that the recipe was created over 150 years ago. Why would be the most recent case of genericization?
The chocolate ingredient was invented 150 years ago. The cake recipe was 1952.
The best explanation for a murky situation in given by Andrew Liptak in The Unauthorized Lord of the Rings
By 1964, the success and popularity of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the U.K. was readily apparent, and Wollheim called Tolkien to look into purchasing the rights for Ace. The series had been imported to the U.S. by Houghton Mifflin, who was granted a limited, five-year license to import the trilogy in limited numbers to America. According to Betsy Wollheim in a recent interview, Tolkien was not interested in seeing his books in paperback form: “When he called up Professor Tolkien in 1964 and asked if he could publish Lord of the Rings as Ace paperbacks, Tolkien said he would never allow his great works to appear in so ‘degenerate a form’ as the paperback book.”
Offended by Tolkien’s slight on the medium from which he made his living, Wollheim didn’t give up. In an essay in Leigh Grossman’s Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction about her father, Betsy Wollheim noted that her father was stubborn, and did as he believed was right. With some research, he found a what he thought was a loophole in copyright law: The limited copyright under which Houghton Mifflin had been publishing the books had expired and wasn’t renewed, and he believed that the copyright for The Lord of the Rings had been abandoned, and that it was in the public domain. With this reasoning, he could publish the novels without coming to an agreement with the Oxford professor and bring the books to the “degenerate form” which he was most familiar. At this point in time, the U.S. had yet to join the International Copyright Convention, and most laws on the books existed to protect domestic creations from foreign ones. As the trilogy became incredibly popular, Houghton Mifflin was technically in violation of the law when they exceeded their import limits, and failed to renew their interim copyright. Wollheim and Ace set about printing their own edition of the trilogy, with a new typeset and with the appendices photographically reprinted. The new editions also featured bright covers from Ace cover artist Jack Gaughan.
The rest of the article is also fascinating and I urge people to read it all. Liptak cites a later court case which concludes that the copyright holder did not lose rights under the 1909 law because someone printed a copy without the copyright notice. And he notes that Tolkien hated the now-famed Ballantine covers and preferred the Ace covers done by Jack Gaughan.
Copyright is governed by the Berne Convention and US law, so it is granted by the government. Before the change in US copyright law in 1977, you had no rights at all unless you were registered. The US government granted those rights.
An unregistered copyright (granted in the US in 1977) still gives you the right to go after infringers. It just doesn’t let you get statutory damages – the infringer has to stop publishing the work, and is only required to pay your actual damages, which is very hard to prove.
It is granted by operation of the law. It is not granted by an agency of the government.
Registered copyright is. You must contact the copyright office for the paperwork.
You need to register your copyright if you want a chance to win any infringement suit.
I said this above, but copyright and registration are two separate things. Registration is not the copyright. It’s a special ticket that gets you into the courthouse if you want to initiate an infringement lawsuit. Registration doesn’t create your copyright. It gives you additional benefits. Furthermore, you aren’t registering a copyright. You are registering only a claim of copyright. So it is not a “registered copyright.” Legally, its a “registered claim.” If multiple people with contradictory claims appear at the Copyright Office, the Copyright Office won’t determine which one is true; it will just register all the claims. That’s why the Copyright Office registered Craig Wright’s claim that he is the author of the Satoshi Nakamoto article, even though nobody believes him.
Moderator Note
This thread is about losing trademark protection.
Some discussion of copyright is acceptable since there are situations where you can have a similar loss of rights, but an in-depth discussion of how copyright works is well beyond the scope of this thread. Feel free to discuss this elsewhere, but let’s put the focus of this thread back on trademarks and lost protections.
The situation regarding the Allen Wrench/Allen Key trademark is both recent and confusing. The company has been bought out a couple times and all it’s products are now under the Crescent brand. No more Allen Wrenches are being sold. I saw here a some time back that the old Allen company gave up the trademark on their wrenches but I also see some that say it’s been renewed. A search of the USPTO isn’t helping.
The mark is for “Allen”. Trademark Registration number 4160757
~Max