{
  "id": "copyright.legal",
  "term": "copyright",
  "sense": "legal",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 10,
  "arena": "copyright",
  "domain": "intellectual property",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a governance policy that a person can use to control who may use a piece of information",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "information.knowledge",
      "policy.governance",
      "control.ability",
      "governance.administrative",
      "people.social",
      "piece.portion",
      "use.application"
    ],
    "interaction": "a person applies control through an administrative governance system to regulate access to a portion of knowledge, enabling selective application by others under defined rules",
    "novel_properties": [
      "exclusive usage rights",
      "enforceable ownership claim",
      "regulated access to knowledge"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Disney lobbied for the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to protect Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "The GPL-3.0 license allows software developers to share code while enforcing attribution and reuse conditions.",
      "domain": "computing"
    },
    {
      "text": "J.K. Rowling receives royalties from every copy of Harry Potter sold, under UK and international copyright law.",
      "domain": "economics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "policy.governance",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    },
    {
      "id": "information.knowledge",
      "note": "enables usage control",
      "type": "enables"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "copyright",
    "copyrighted",
    "copyrighting",
    "copyrights"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "factual",
      "note": "The original record omitted several constitutive concepts (control, governance, people, piece, use). These were missing despite being essential, so they were added; definition was factually correct bu"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-copyright.legal"
}