Blog Posts by Subject: Copyright

Intern Lexa Armstrong shares what she learned while working in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

Why do we digitize? Why is access important?

We deposit into our archives a transcript of every interview conducted as part of the Oral History Project. These are nearly all available for use on-site at the library.

No copyright!

Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a Public Domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The Public Domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture. —James Boyle, The Public Domain, p.40f, 2008, quoted on the

Did Cole Porter steal the music for some of his most popular songs? Ira B. Arnstein thought so. He took Porter, and several other songwriters, to court for copyright infringement during the 1930s and 1940s.

Unfair to Genius: The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein, by Gary A. Rosen

"Tin Pan Alley" wasn't 

The Hat - Patents and TrademarksThe talent pool in patents and trademarks at SIBL is deep — which means we're almost always ready to answer IP questions on the spot when they come up. But I've been lucky and have had the opportunity to wear the patent and trademark hat — yes, there is one, it won first place in a contest a few years ago! And among the privileges this brings is the opportunity to invite U.S. Patent and Trademark Office representatives to come to SIBL every couple of years for public and staff 

Last year, musical theater composers Georgia Stitt and Jason Robert Brown wrote a couple of high profile blog entries in which they pleaded with their fans to stop illegally sharing the sheet music of their works online. Several national (and international) news organizations followed up with Brown in

Perhaps one of the more quaint job titles in the U.S. Federal government, the Register of Copyrights is not exactly descriptive of the duties involved. It's not about stamping books and other works submitted for registration. Instead, it's all about policy: studies, analysis and advice to Congress and providing technical expertise and assistance to various agencies in the Federal Government and other countries.

At the Patent and Trademark Depository Library conference this last April, our group was fortunate enough to meet with the US Patent and Trademark 

So you have your menu—and now need to choose which form of IP protection to use for your bottle or other idea. Of course if you have all the time and money in the world, maybe you can do it all. But since the question really is about business, it's important to consider what works for you before starting the final processes to protect your IP.

You're a business-person, and to sleep easier know you must choose wisely. What will it cost? How long will it take to get? How long will it 

While for certain kinds of things the choice of which form of IP protection to seek is obvious, it's not too hard to think of examples where there could be more than one possibility. To illustrate this point, I would like to use for an example nothing less than a humble bottle.  

So, 

It's impossible to expect every researcher coming to SIBL to know the differences between the four main types of Intellectual Property (IP) protection. We have found that Patent, Copyright and Trademark, by attorney Richard Stim, is an excellent resource for learning about and comparing these laws.

When readers come to SIBL, the New York Public Library's representative to the Patent and Trademark 

Unusual connections abound in hyperspace, and not just from html linking within web pages. Take for example the unlikely cohabitation between a teen pop star and human rights activism on the same website. With the egalitarian nature of content available on the Internet, unlikely partners such as Justin Bieber, the TV-like Really Annoying Orange, and human rights abuse reporting in

Steven Johnson will be moderating next week's LIVE from the NYPL event, "Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy" — Thursday, February 26 at 7pm at the Celeste Bartos Forum at The New York Public Library

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The great thing about next Thursday's NYPL event on remix culture is the fact that the topic is at once incredibly timely, and yet at the same time 

I read an article by Anthony Grafton in the November 5, 2007 issue of the New Yorker, titled "Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents." Essentially the article is about the digitization of books and related material by Google and other organizations. What I liked best about the article was his discussion of the incompleteness of the project. Grafton discusses the process of choosing what is going to be digitized. Material not currently digitized is material from poor countries, material