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Obtaining copyright permission is the process of getting consent from a copyright owner to use the owner's creative material. Obtaining permission is often called "licensing"; when you have permission, you have a license to use the work. Permission is often (but not always) required because of intellectual property laws that protect creative works such as text, artwork or music. (These laws are explained in more detail in the next section.) If you use a copyrighted work without the appropriate permission, you may be violating (usually called "infringing") the owner's rights to that work. Infringing someone else's copyright may subject you to legal action, including being forced to stop using the work or paying financial damages.
As noted above, permission is not always required. In some situations you can reproduce a photograph, a song or text without a license. Generally, this will be true if the work has fallen into the public domain, or if your use qualifies as what's called a "fair use." Both these legal concepts involve quite specific rules and are discussed more fully in subsequent chapters. In most cases, however, permission is required, so it's important never to assume that it's okay to use a work without permission.
Many people operate illegally, either intentionally or through ignorance. They use other people's work and never seek consent. The problem with this approach--besides its questionable ethics --is that the more successful the project becomes, the more likely that a copyright owner will learn of the use. Therefore, if you want your project to become successful, unauthorized uses become an obstacle.
Some people avoid permissions because they don't understand the permissions process or consider it too expensive. However, the process is not foreboding and the fee for common text, photo or artwork uses is commonly under $150 per use --and in some cases, it is free. On the other hand, the legal fees for dealing with an unauthorized use lawsuit can easily cost ten to 50 times the average permission expense...or more!
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©2005-2008 The Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University. With the exception of the Nolo Copyright and Fair Use Overview, this work is
licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.