The 1976 Act, through its terms, displaces all previous copyright laws in the United States insofar as those laws conflict with the Act. Those include prior federal legislation, such as the Copyright Act of 1909, and extend to all relevant
common law and state copyright laws. An eighth category, architectural works, was added in 1990. The wording of section 102 is significant mainly because it effectuated a major change in the mode of United States copyright protection. Under the last major statutory revision to U.S. copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1909, federal statutory copyright protection attached to original works only when those works were 1) published and 2) had a notice of copyright affixed. State copyright law governed protection for unpublished works before the adoption of the 1976 Act, but published works, whether containing a notice of copyright or not, were governed exclusively by federal law. If no notice of copyright was affixed to a work and the work was, in fact, "published" in a legal sense, the 1909 Act provided no copyright protection and the work became part of the
public domain. Under the 1976 Act, however, section 102 says that copyright protection extends to original works that are
fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Thus, the 1976 Act broadened the scope of federal statutory copyright protection from "published" works to works that are "fixed".
Exclusive rights Section 106 granted five exclusive rights to copyright holders, all of which are subject to the remaining sections in chapter 1 (currently, sections 107–122): • the right to
reproduce (copy) the work into copies and phonorecords, • the right to create
derivative works of the original work, • the right to
distribute copies and phonorecords of the work to the public by sale, lease, or rental, • the right to
perform the work publicly (if the work is a literary, musical, dramatic, choreographic, pantomime, motion picture, or other audiovisual work), and • the right to
display the work publicly (if the work is a literary, musical, dramatic, choreographic, pantomime, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, motion picture, or other audiovisual work).
Reproduction, adaptation, and distribution The first three enumerated rights apply to all kinds of copyrighted works and have been "characterized as rights of copying, recording, adaptation, and publishing." The reproduction right encompasses the right to create a new fixation of a work, i.e. any material object in which its embodiment is "sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration." Visually perceptible "copies" and "
phonorecords" both fall under the reproduction right, and the right is implicated when a work is copied "in whole or in any substantial part," and when a work is imitated rather than duplicated exactly. However, a subsequent draft in 1964 reintroduced the derivative work right as a separate right to make clear that adaptation, and not just verbatim copying, is within the scope of the author's exclusive rights. The same definition of "derivative work" was used to specify both the scope of the derivative work right and what types of transformations of existing works were eligible for independent copyright protection. The distribution right encompasses the author's right to control the first publication of a work. The
first-sale doctrine limits the scope of this right: once the copyright owner has parted with ownership of a particular copy or phonorecord of a work, the present owner of that item is free to sell, give away, or otherwise dispose of it. However, distribution of infringing copies or phonorecords would be an infringement of the distribution right. More generally, merely possessing a copy of a work acquired through rental, lease, or lending does not give the person in possession of it the right to distribute or dispose of it. A sixth exclusive right was later included in 1995 by the
Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act: the right to perform a
sound recording publicly by means of digital audio transmission.
Fair use Additionally, the fair use defense to
copyright infringement was codified for the first time in section 107 of the 1976 Act. Fair use was not a novel proposition in 1976, however, as
federal courts had been using a common law form of the doctrine since the 1840s (an
English version of fair use appeared much earlier). The Act codified this common law doctrine with little modification. Under section 107, the fair use of a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement, even if such use technically violates section 106. While fair use explicitly applies to use of copyrighted work for criticism, news reporting,
teaching,
scholarship, or research purposes, the defense is not limited to these areas. The Act gives four factors to be considered to determine whether a particular use is a fair use: • the purpose and character of the use (commercial or educational, trans-formative or reproductive, political); • the nature of the copyrighted work (fictional or factual, the degree of creativity); • the
amount and substantiality of the portion of the original work used; and • the effect of the use upon the
market (or potential market) for the original work. The Act was later amended to extend the fair use defense to unpublished works.
Compulsory licenses The Copyright Act of 1976 included provisions for four types of
compulsory licenses: • Section 111 established a compulsory license of certain
cable television retransmissions of over-the-air broadcasts permitted under FCC regulations. The statute was later amended, by the
Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act in 1995 and Title IV of the
DMCA in 1998, to establish compulsory licenses under sections 112 and 114 for non-interactive digital transmissions of sound recordings.
Term of protection Previous copyright law set the duration of copyright protection at 28 years with a possibility of a 28 year extension, for a total maximum term of 56 years. The 1976 Act, however, substantially increased the term of protection. Section 302 of the Act extended protection to "a term consisting of the life of the author and fifty years after the author's death". In addition, the Act created a static 75-year term (dated from the date of publication) for anonymous works, pseudonymous works, and
works made for hire. Under section 304, the extension term for works copyrighted before 1978 that had not already entered the public domain was increased from 28 years to 47 years, giving a total term of 75 years. Prior case law on this issue was conflicting, with some cases espousing a rule similar to section 204 and others reaching a quite different conclusion. In the 1942 New York case
Pushman v. New York Graphic Society, for example, the court held that although a copyright in a work is distinct from a property right in a copy of the work, where the only existing copy of the work is transferred, the copyright is transferred along with the copy, unless expressly withheld by the author. Section 202 of the 1976 Act retains the property right/copyright distinction, but section 204 eliminates the inconsistent common law by assuming that the copyright is withheld by the author unless it is expressly transferred. The Act also codified the ability for writers and other artists who transfer or license their copyrights to others to act on
termination rights, other than for
works made for hire, 35 years after the publication of the work. This was intended to allow these people to renegotiate licensing or transfer agreements at the later period if the value of the work was not apparent at the time of creation. The law requires the creator to issue notice of termination at least 2 years prior to the 35-year date, giving the rights holder time to prepare. Terminations of grants executed on or after January 1, 1978, are governed by section 203 of the Act, while terminations of pre-1978 are governed by section 304, preserving authors' rights under the old
renewal system. The Act does, however, allow for registration, and gives the Copyright Office the power to promulgate the necessary forms. Aside from Copyright Office paperwork, the Act requires only that one copy, or two copies if the work has been published, be deposited with the Office to accomplish registration. Though registration is not required for copyright protection to attach to a work, section 411 of the Act does require registration before a copyright infringement action by the creator of the work can proceed. Even if registration is denied, however, an infringement action can continue if the creator of the work joins the Copyright Office as a defendant, requiring the court to determine the copyrightability of the work before addressing the issue of infringement. ==Industry-specific provisions==