Copyright, Copyleft: The Use and Reuse of Media

Newer mediums such as open source software provide a challenge to traditional concepts of copyright, importing into the law their own ideas of rights and ownership – such as the now infamous copyleft slogan “all wrongs reserved”.

• Two parties created conceptually similar, but slightly different, content for commercial use. Judge Birss held that there were obvious similarities between the two works and that these similarities were due to the fact that the defendant saw the original work before creating his own image.

• Copyright attaches to a variety of dramatic, literary, artistic and musical works. Computer software has been deemed as literary work for the sake of the Act.​​
• There are exceptions in the Copyright Act for educational institutions, libraries and archives for certain uses of original works.
• Authorial contribution is paramount to determining who the author of a piece of work is and if someone recreates a piece of work after they have seen it, with the intent to recreate it then they may be in breach of copyright.
• Creative Commons is an example of an open source license that allows the owner of the copyright to license their work to everyone and specifies the ways in which their work may be used.

• When starting a commercial software project that might include open source code, take a copy of the original open source code that you use.
• Make sure to freely give back to the open source community if you have used any of its code, especially if you fix a bug or enhance the original open source work.
• To be an effective copyright lawyer, you need to have an understanding of the area you are working in, outside of the law. To do this, get practical experience in the copyright area you wish to work in. Talk to people who actually work in the area, not just lawyers.