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Legalities

Intellectual Property

There are three basic types of intellectual property: trademarks (indicated by a ™ or ® symbol), copyrights (the ubiquitous ©), and patents (sometimes indicated by text noting that the invention is patent protected or a patent number but often by nothing at all).

Patents are used to declare ownership over inventions only. You cannot patent images, text, or any information itself.

A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, and/or design that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others. A service mark is a word, phrase, symbol, and/or design that identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than goods. The term “trademark” is often used to refer to both trademarks and service marks.

Unlike with patents, the ownership of a trademark depends heavily on the context in which it is used. For example, if I wish to publish a blog post with an accompanying picture of the Coca-Cola logo, I could do that, as long as I wasn’t implying that my blog post was sponsored by, or published by, Coca-Cola.

Fair use

Storing or displaying a trademark as a reference to the brand it represents is fine. Using a trademark in a way that might mislead the consumer is not. The concept of “fair use” does not apply to patents, however.

Both trademarks and patents have something in common in that they have to be formally registered in order to be recognized. This is not true with copyrighted material.

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Switzerland, is the international standard for copyright. In practice, this means that, as a US citizen, you can be held accountable in the United States for violating the copyright of material written by someone in, say, France (and vice versa).

What makes images, text, music, etc., copyrighted? Every piece of material you create is automatically subject to copyright law as soon as you bring it into existence. Copyright protection extends to creative works only. It does not cover statistics or facts.

Usage

Even copyrighted content can be used directly, within reason, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1988. The DMCA outlines some rules for the automated handling of copyrighted material, with two main points:

  • Under the safe harbor protection, if you scrape material from a source, you are protected as long as you removed the copyrighted material when notified.
  • You cannot circumvent security measures (such as password protection) in order to gather content.

In short, you should never directly publish copyrighted material without permission from the original author or copyright holder. If you are storing copyrighted material that you have free access to in your own nonpublic database for the purposes of analysis, that is fine. If you are publishing that database to your website for viewing or download, that is not fine. If you are analyzing that database and publishing statistics about word counts, a list of authors by prolificacy, or some other meta-analysis of the data, that is fine. If you are accompanying that meta-analysis with a few select quotes, or brief samples of data to make your point, that is likely also fine, but you might want to examine the fair-use clause in the US Code to make sure.