The law doesn’t set out hard and fast rules about how much copyrighted material one can use without crossing the line between fair use and copyright infringement. If a news story quotes a sentence or two from a book that is relevant to the topic of the story, the author of the book would...

Are Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson still under a legal cloak (or cape, if you will) of copyright law?  The Supreme Court may have to solve that mystery, to decide a new legal plea filed Tuesday by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scottish creator of that fictional detective and his far less...

Regular readers of this blog know that I post a lot of small snippets from larger articles that I think you should read. To do this I highlight and copy that text from the original, paste it here, and then link to the original. Yeah, well, that’s usually easy. This weekend I ran into...

I’ve participated in several online discussion recently over some copyright questions. Almost every time, the question involves something generally innocuous, but the person isn’t all the sure if it violates copyright or not. Generally I respond with something along the lines of “go for it. If you’re asked to stop, then decide whether to...