The owner of these rights can give away, sell or license any or all of them on either a temporary or permanent basis. An infringer may be enjoined from publishing the work even without any formal notice of copyright. However, prior notice and registration with the U.S. Copyright Office are necessary in order to sue an infringer for damages and attorneys fees. The duration of a copyright varies greatly depending on the year in which it was created or published because the law has been amended several times, most recently in October of 1998. Currently, a copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years.
Publication includes loaning, leasing, selling, or giving away copies of the work.
The author may also put the work into the public domain before expiration of the statutory period by expressly saying so. There can be multiple owners of a copyrighted work and joint ownership is becoming more and more common with the proliferation of multimedia works. This makes obtaining permissions all the more difficult, and makes copying without permission all the more risky. There are essentially two ways you can copy and use copyrighted material. On our campus, the Bookstore will perform this service free of charge for faculty.