"copyright" is really a collection of rights that belong to
the creator of an original work -- for example, a book, an article, a
painting, or a recording. U.S. copyright law recognizes seven of these
rights, among them
- the right to reproduce the work
- the right to produce derivative works
- the right to perform the work in public
The purpose of copyright law is to promote the "useful arts" by ensuring that the person who creates an "original work" can benefit from it.
The law requires a copyrighted work to be expressed in a "fixed and
tangible" form -- in other words, you can't copyright a song you've
sung or a story you've told but never written down. Material that you've
saved to a disk or posted to a discussion group would probably be considered "fixed and tangible," although, to be on the safe side, it couldn't
hurt to print a copy to paper.
Copyright is only available for "original works" -- that is, things you've
created yourself. You can't reprint a Shakespeare sonnet, which is in
the public domain (see
page 136), and copyright it in your own name.
You're likely to care about copyright in two situations:
- 1. You're producing an original work and want to know what information you can legitimately take from other sources.
- 2. You've completed the work and want to keep others from infringing
your rights to it.
Q. How do I get a copyright on something I've written?
Congratulations! You probably already have it. Thanks to the
Berne
Convention of 1988, writers and artists in the United States automatically own the copyright to any work they create the moment it is created (with certain exceptions, of course -- you didn't expect this to be
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