Adkins Law PLLC focuses on family law matters such as child custody, child support, divorce, and the division of marital assets. If you have a family law issue and need to speak with an attorney, contact Adkins Law. We have locations in Huntersville and Ballantyne, and primarily serve Mecklenburg County, south Charlotte, and the Lake Norman area.
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In North Carolina, you may seek a domestic violence protective order (DVPO) when someone you have or had a personal relationship with does one of the following: (1) Attempts to cause bodily injury, or intentionally causes bodily injury; (2) Places you or a member of your family or household in fear of imminent serious bodily injury; (3) Continued harassment that rises to such a level as to inflict substantial emotional distress; OR (4) Commits rape or a sexual offense. Someone you have or had a “personal relationship” with includes: (1) Your spouse, or ex-spouse; (2) A person of the opposite sex with whom you live or used to live; (3) Someone you are related to, including parents, grandparents and grandchildren, over the age of sixteen; (4) Someone with whom you have a child in common; (5) A current or former household member; OR (6) Someone of the opposite sex whom you are dating or have dated. There are two types of DVPOs: (1) An ex parte temporary protective order; and (2) A final domestic violence protective order. An ex parte temporary protective order is designed to provide you and your family with immediate protection. If a judge believes there is a serious and immediate danger to you or your family, an ex parte order may be issued, which will protect you until the court hearing on the final domestic violence protective order. This usually lasts for ten days, but can, on occasion, be continued to last longer. A final domestic violence protective order, also called a DVPO or a 50B, lasts up to one year. During this year, the abuser may not assault, threaten, abuse, follow, harass, or interfere with you. A DVPO may also grant you sole access to your home, possessions, pets, custody of your children, and spousal support. Once the one-year period is over, you may ask the court to extend the order for an additional year. DVPOs are powerful tools that can be used to protect you and your family from domestic violence. They may, however, also be used as a tool to get you out of the marital home and as leverage in a child custody dispute. Occasionally, a spouse will make false allegations of abuse in the hopes of being granted sole possession of the marital home and property, and custody of any minor children. While these situations are rare, you still must prepare and defend yourself against the allegations. If you would like to speak with a domestic attorney concerning obtaining or defending against a DVPO, please contact Adkins Law. Adkins Law is located in Huntersville, North Carolina and primarily serves Mecklenburg County and the Lake Norman area. In North Carolina, your driver’s license can be suspended for a number of reasons. The suspension period will vary based on the reason for the suspension. Commonly, people have their licenses suspended for failing to pay fines, speeding and reckless driving convictions, and DWI / DUI. You may also have your license suspended for failing to pay child support. If your license is suspended, you will receive notification from the NC DMV. At that time, you may be able to request an administrative hearing to attempt to reinstate your license. Administrative hearings are not guaranteed and are granted depending on the reason for the suspension. Upon requesting a hearing, you will retain your driver’s license and privilege to drive until you have the hearing. If you wish to request a hearing, or if you would like to find out if you are eligible to have a hearing, you can contact the NC DMV’s hearing office by phone or mail. North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles Driver License Hearings 3116 Mail Service Center Raleigh, North Carolina 27699-3116 (919) 715-7000 Additionally, it’s important to note that if you lose your NC DMV hearing, you are able to appeal the decision of the first hearing to the North Carolina Superior Court if the appeal is made within thirty days. If you would like to speak with a Huntersville traffic attorney concerning a suspended license in Huntersville, North Carolina, please contact Adkins Law to arrange a consultation. By Elspeth Crawford If an author has a copyright in his or her work, whether that work is a book, a piece of software, or some other creative endeavor, they are granted exclusive control over how the work can be used. However, that control is not complete. Other people can make limited use of that work so long as their use falls within certain guidelines. Those guidelines are called fair use, and this guide will look at their utility and limits. Bounds of Fair Use The bounds of fair use are set out in the Copyright Act of 1976. That law states that people are allowed to copy a creative work without permission from the author for certain limited purposes, including criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. Sometimes, deciding whether fair use applies is easy. For example, if a teacher makes multiple copies of an excerpt from a copyrighted book to hand out to his or her students, such copying would be a fair use of the book. It would fall under the ‘teaching’ allowance specified in the law. However, most determinations of fair use are not so cut and dry. Determining whether something falls within the ambit of fair use is a factually intensive process. Courts look at four different factors when making their decision. Not all of the factors apply to all works, and no one factor is determinative. The four factors are: Purpose and Character of the Use When deciding whether a work falls under fair use, a court will look at the purpose of the work. One thing they’ll look at is whether the work is commercial in nature. Say someone has taken a copyrighted photograph and used it in a collage. If they intend to sell this collage as its own work, the work would be commercial. If a work is commercial, it stands less of a chance of being found to be a fair use. If the artist did not intend to sell the collage but made it for his or her own personal benefit, it would not be commercial and would stand a better chance of being found to be a fair use. However, even if that collage were commercial, it’s no guarantee that its creation can't be a fair use. Courts also look at whether a work is transformative, or sufficiently different from the original work so as not to be confused with it. Parodies fall into this category, as do works that re-appropriate the original work in a way that the original author did not contemplate. Nature of the Copyrighted Work The law has determined that some works, specifically those that are creative like novels and movies, are more worthy of copyright protection than those works that are not creative but just reproduce information, like the phone book. Information in something like the phone book is public and copying it would likely be a fair use, whereas copying a movie, which is a highly creative work, would not be. Amount of Copyrighted Work Used Say that a literary critic is reviewing a book and wants to print a short excerpt within the body of his review. Because the critic does not have a copyright in that book, he is in violation of the author’s copyright by printing a portion of it. However, a court may let this slide as a fair use because the amount of the book being reprinted is small when considering the book as a whole. The smaller amount of a copyrighted work someone uses when copying that work, the more likely a court is to hold that the copying is a fair use. Courts also look at whether the portion being copied is particularly important to the identity of the original work. Effect of the Use on the Potential Value of the Copyrighted Work The fourth factor in the fair use test, often called the most important factor, asks whether the potentially infringing work cuts in on a market which should be reserved for the original work. For example, if someone took it upon themselves to write and distribute a self-penned sequel to a popular novel, such a work would cut in on the sequel market for the original work. The unauthorized sequel would fail under this factor. If, however, that same someone wrote a parody of the original novel, that would likely be a fair use since the original author and copyright holder is very unlikely to want to enter into a market for books that make fun of his or her own creation. Basically, this factor asks whether an infringing work may cost the original copyright holder money. If it does, it’s less likely to be a fair use. If it does not, it’s more likely to be a fair use. Remember that no one of the above four factors is determinative when deciding what is a fair use and what is not. A work can fail under one or two of the factors but still be considered a fair use if it succeeds under the remaining ones. Fair use is a complicated area of the law, and you should consult a copyright attorney if you have questions about whether a work you have created is protected under it. |
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