Articles Tagged with Stanford Fair Use & Copyright site

A few weeks ago, a friend at Justia celebrated his birthday. And, you know how it goes. There’s a cake involved and everyone sings that special unique song known for that occasion: “Happy Birthday.” Well, it turns out that the Happy Birthday song is copyrighted. So, for any reproduction, one must ask for permission from the copyright holder or pay a licensing fee.

Now that the holidays are coming, I started wondering about the copyright status of several of the popular songs that we hear everywhere we go during the month of December. If you like to take holiday videos and share them with your family and friends on the web, you should be aware that since January 2009, YouTube has been silencing videos with copyrighted music. So, you cannot just add any song to give your video a touch of holiday spirit.

One of the pro bono projects we’ve been able to work on here at Justia is the Stanford Fair Use & Copyright site.  For those of you who may not be familiar with it, the site is a terrific resource for anyone interested in learning more about copyright in general, as well as for researchers more focused on exploring issues related to the fair use of copyrighted materials.  We frequently update the site, so we encourage even those of you who may already be familiar with it to stop by and check it out!