Lillie Law, LLC

Under the 1976 Copyright Act as amended, a work is protected by copyright from the time it is created in a fixed form. The copyright immediately becomes the property of the author who created it. Generally, the person who created a work is the author of that work but there is an exception to that rule. Where a work is "made for hire," the employer, not the employee, is considered the author.

A provision for the restoration of foreign works from public domain status in the United States was included in the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act. The provision went into effect on January 1, 1996, and applies to members of the Berne Convention, members of the World Trade Organization, and countries specifically extended protection by presidential proclamations.

United States patent law has provided patent protection for new varieties of asexually reproduced plants since the 1930s. Congress passed the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) in 1970 to "encourage the development of novel varieties of sexually reproduced plants and to make them available to the public."

A party is entitled to use a trademark in such as way as to describe the qualities that a mark represents as long as the manner of use of the mark is not as a trademark but only used in a descriptive sense. Fair use of a trademark occurs when a defendant uses a descriptive trademark of another party to describe the defendant's own product. This is the fair use defense set forth in the Lanham Act that provides:

Copyright protection in the United States is automatic upon the fixation of an original work of authorship. The use of the copyright notice and the registration of a work are referred to as formalities, which are the procedural requirements for securing and maintaining full copyright protection, and were formerly requirements for copyright protection. Some of the most sweeping changes under the 1976 Copyright Act involve copyright formalities.