Get Your Copyrights, Here
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Intellectual Property (often abbreviated IP) is the legal concept that certain types of ideas may be owned by individuals, corporations, or in some cases even governments. Ideas that nobody owns (the default case unless a specific law says otherwise) are in the “public domain,” which means anyone can legally do whatever they like with them. Intellectual property laws are laws that fence off portions of the public domain and give them to specific owners. The three major types of laws that create intellectual property are trademarks, patents, and copyrights. Yesterday’s column was about trademarks, which deal with names, slogans, mascots, and other ways of uniquely identifying oneself and one’s products to customers. Today’s topic is a brief and oversimplified introduction to copyright and licensing, which is the type of law that turns original creative works into intellectual property. Copyright is “copy right,” or the right to make copies of an original, creative work such as a piece of software, writing, art, music, etc. The copyright holder is the only one who has the right to make copies, and they can sue anybody who makes copies without permission for monetary damages (assuming, of course, they can prove in court that the unauthorized copying damaged them monetarily). They can also sue to have the court order those unlicensed copies to be destroyed. The creator of a work doesn’t have to apply for a copyright, or even publicly state that the work is copyrighted (although that doesn’t hurt). Any copyrightable work is automatically granted a copyright, which must be sold or given away (to someone else, or into the public domain) in order to be lost. For example, each time you write an e-mail, you as the author automatically get a copyright on it. If somebody else uses your e-mail without your permission, you technically have grounds to sue them (although in most cases it wouldn’t be worthwhile). You may not know how to enforce the rights your copyright legally reserves to you, but you still have a copyright anyway. The actual author isn’t always the owner of the copyright. If somebody else hired them to create it, then it qualifies as “work for hire” and the copyright on that creation belongs to the one who commissioned and paid for it, not the one who actually designed or implemented it. This is how corporations wind up with most of their copyrights: when their employees create things as part of their jobs, the resulting copyrights belong to the corporation. A work has to be an original creation to be copyrightable, and a certain amount of creativity is required. You can’t, for example, copyright newly discovered digits of the mathematical constant Pi because there was no creativity involved. Anyone who did that would have gotten exactly the same result. But different photographs of the same landscape differ slightly depending on the photographer, and as such would be copyrightable. More : fool.com |