Copyright and Creativity Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

right of first publication and Creativity - Essay ExampleIt is purported that right of first publication primarily serves the abrogate of encouraging creativity, because of the inspiration it provides to authors/writers/creators and would-be authors/writers/creators that will see creativity as an opportunity to gain economic advantage as well as an citation of their talent. This claim, however, is being contested by those who argue that artists have been churning out great works of arts for centuries without the benefit of copyright protection. Worse, there are those who grasp copyright protection as an unwitting tool for stifling creativity as illustrated by recent cases where works have been prohibited from seeing offspring on the ground that they infringe the copyright law. The question that is being contemplated by this paper, therefore, is whether or not copyright protection encourages or stifles artistic creativity. Background The US Copyright Law has its roots in the 1710, Statute of Anne, an English law that ended the monopoly of the Stationers Company by vesting sole(prenominal) right of books to their authors for xiv years, subject to renewal. After the American Revolution in the 18th century, several states their own copyright laws that took after the Statute of Anne, but the Constitutional Convention firm that a unifying law on copyright should be enacted nationally and thus, attached a clause mandating such passage in Article 1 of the proposed Constitution. The subsequent Copyright Act of 1970 copied the 14-year period of exclusive right to authors renewable for another 14 years and was made applicable solely to books, maps and maritime charts. Eventually, however, the US copyright law was broadened to cover other original works as well. In the Copyright Act of 1909, the coverage of the grant extended to all written works not only in the US but to various written foreign works as well. In addition, it extended the period of the exclusive r ight to 28 years, which is renewable for another 28 years. The next copyright law, i.e. Copyright Act of 1976 is the precursor of the march US copyright law. This Act eliminated many another(prenominal) of the earlier features as well as added new ones. For example, it established a single period of exclusive right for all kinds of works, which is the life of the author sum 50 years, dismissed the formalities and made the right applicable the very moment the work becomes a concrete medium of expression. 1 Before the present consolidated US copyright law came into being, the Copyright Act 1976 went through various amendments and supplementations. These include the following the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which added copyright grant to digital audio recordings the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which extended the exclusive right to 20 years, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which deals with high-technology works. 2 Features of the Present U S Copyright Law Under the present US Copyright Law, which is denominated as Title 17 of the United States Code, the exclusive rights to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, display publicly and use in a digital audio transmission of works, are granted only to their authors or creators.3 The copyright grant covers only 8 kinds of words, and their respective derivatives, namely literary