THE BIG BUNDLE OF RIGHTS

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=Where we take a basic look at what copyright is, and why you need to choose your roommates with care=

Copyright is every right you have as the owner of a creative work -- not a physical or digital copy of the work, but the work itself. Copyright as a whole usually belongs to the creator of the work, but that's not always the case.

Still, for now let's start from the position of the lone creator, the one who writes or draws a work that's entirely his/her own, not for anyone else and not because it's the creator's job. This is the context that the law assumes, and while it does talk about copyright in other situations, it's best to start from the default.

By law, we're primarily talking about Republic Act No. 8293, the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, as well as various international treaties that the Philippines has signed.

We say "copyright" but what we really mean is every right to do something with the work that could conceivably earn you money. It's why the IP Code also calls these rights "Economic Rights." In the Philippines, the IP Code enumerates these acts broadly in Section 177, but let me try to give a summary with less legalese.

The Right to Reproduce - No, this has nothing to do with sex. What's the most common form of copyright infringement in the Internet age? It's downloading/torrenting creative work such as films, comics, albums, and television shows. It's not "theft" since downloading/torrenting leaves the original file untouched, but it violates the rights of the copyright holder because it reproduces the work without proper authorization.

Printing falls under reproduction as well. If you don't have an agreement with a publisher, and suddenly you find your book in bookstores, then that's a violation of your right to reproduction. If your roommate uploads the manuscript of your novel to Scribd and makes it available for free or for a price, then that's a violation of your right to reproduction. (Also, kill your roommate.)

The Right to Transform - No, this has nothing to do with Michael Bay -- no, wait, actually it does. If Peter Lair retained the Right to Transform aspect of his copyright over the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, then he'd be able to do more than gently criticize their new looks -- he'd be able to stop the Michael Bay abomination in its tracks. Adapting a property to another medium -- in the Turtles' case, from comics to film -- is a transformation of the work, and the Right to Transform is included in the bundle of rights found in copyright. Transformation includes acts like translation, dramatization, and abridgment.

The Right to First Distribution - If you finish a beautiful painting of yourself and celebrate with a ten hour sleep-a-thon, and in the meantime your roommate grabs it and bartered it to your landlady as payment for rent, then that is a violation of your right to first distribution. (Also, what is up with your roommates?) Note that this only covers the first distribution of your work -- if you voluntarily trade your landlady in payment of your rent, and she turns around and sells it to your roommate so that he can do creepy things with it, you can't prevent your landlady from making that sale, since at that point the painting is her property, and she has the right to transfer ownership to whomever she wants.

The Right to Rent - However, if you shot a video of yourself doing an interpretative dance and bartered it to your landlady as payment for rent, then you can prevent her from renting the video to your latest creepy roommate, because ownership of an audiovisual work (and a few other things, like a computer program) doesn't automatically include the right to rent it out. The Right to Rent these types of works is included in the copyright bundle-o-fun.

The Right to Show - The right to perform or publicly display a work, or communicate a work to the public is also included in the copyright bundle. While "performance" and "public display" are fairly self-explanatory, "communication" of a work is a broad term that courts are still arguing about. For now, it seems that making a work available to unintended recipients falls under unauthorized "communication" -- think live-streams of events that allow non-paying viewers to watch a for-pay event.

Seeing "copyright" as being a bundle of those five general categories of rights is important, because you learn to see copyright as something that you can parcel out in pieces -- and not just five pieces either. There hundreds of ways you can split the copyright pie, and that's one of the most valuable -- and lucrative -- tools that you have as a copyright holder. We'll get into that in our next instalment.

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