Intellectual Property Litigation Series It may not have been how I initially wanted to spend my Saturday evening, but if I hadn't gone it would have been extremely difficult to write this paper. I attended Molly Kleinman's talk on copyright and how it relates to libraries. So there I was with my pen and notebook ready to take notes for later use. At first he started by talking about the purpose of copyright. From there he provided two different views on copyright, first what it means according to the Constitution and then according to some large companies. Not surprisingly, there was a huge difference in each definition. The Constitution states that the purpose was to promote the progress of the useful sciences and arts. The definition according to large companies is the one I'm most familiar with, or it would be closest to how I would define it. They claim it's about giving media companies total control over content, forever and ever. However, she got to a point in her lecture where she explained where copyright comes from, apparently it just happens. Previously you had to have the © symbol and therefore register your work at the copyright office, but this is no longer the case. It now exists from the moment it was created and lasts for the author's lifetime plus 70 years after death. This ties into what we talked about in class, which is whether something is actually copyrighted. Someone pointed out the fact that, in truth, everything you write in a book has to come from an idea you got from something else. It could be the whole plot of the boy and the girl who fell in love. The point is that there are hundreds of books with the same kind of plot with some twists, but in the end they are all more or less the same idea. Also during his presentation he mentioned the different types of intellectual property, something we discussed in class. They included copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The differences between them are as follows; Copyright protects creative expression. Patents protect useful inventions. Branding protects company identities and products, while trade secrecy protects formulas and processes that are not easily discovered.