Continuing on with copyrights. A copyright is a form of IP protection that allows you to protect your written work. Specifically, copyright is a legal right that grants authors of an original work exclusive rights over its use and distribution. Copyright comes in many forms. Almost anything is copyrightable. We'll talk about some examples. But there are a few things that are available for copyright protection and we name them here. Facts and ideas aren't things that you can copyright. But books, artwork, performances, and other literary works can be protected by copyright. Software, webpages, photos, your business plans, your marketing material. All of that is subject to copyright protection. In addition to your original works, like the ones we just described, derivative works are also protected by copyright. A good example of a derivative work is a movie sequel. The original movie is protected by copyright. If someone takes the ideas in the original movie and creates a sequel to the movie, that's a derivative work because it's derived from the original work. That derivative work also is protected by copyright. Let's talk about expression and ideas because as we just said, ideas are not protected by copyright. Here is why. If I asked each of you to describe a vase, we'll get multiple different expressions of what a vase is. Someone came up with this beautiful vase that we see here on the screen. But each of you are likely to come up with a very different expression of what the idea of a vase is. Because of that, copyright aims to not protect the idea itself, but how you express that idea. This artist's expression of a vase would be protected by copyright. Each of the individual expressions of a vase that you would come up with would be protected by copyright. Another example of this is the movie Coming to America, which some of you may be familiar with. Art Buchwald had this great idea for a script. In the script, an African prince would come to America to find his bride. Art pitched this idea to a movie studio. The movie studio took copious notes of the idea and then properly rejected the idea. Fast-forward, the movie studio puts out the movie Coming to America, which essentially was an expression of the idea that Art had given them during his meeting. Unfortunately for Art, copyright protection did not protect the idea of his script. He was not able to go after the movie studio for essentially stealing his idea. However, fortunately for Art, and this is something to keep in mind when dealing with folks who you're pitching your ideas to, Art did have a confidentiality agreement and a non-disclosure agreement in place when he pitched his idea, and he was able to use that contract and that agreement to get some remedies for the theft. What does copyright give you? Copyright allows for the owner to prevent anyone from doing the following things. Reproducing copies of the copyrighted work, distributing copies, performing the work itself, display the work publicly, or developing derivative works. The idea of copyright protection doesn't affirmatively give you rights to do any of these. But what it does is give you the right to prevent others from doing any of these things. The requirements to obtain copyright protection are pretty straightforward. First, the work has to be original. You can't use someone else's work. You can't copy someone's software or take words and phrases from their webpage or their business plan and represent it as your own. It must be an original work. The work must also be fixed in a tangible medium. That's just legal jargon for it has to be something that people can transfer. It has to be on a webpage or on a hard drive or in a book. Something tangible that can be distributed. The work must be reduced to something in that form. Then there's a minimal level of creativity. It can't be non-creative. Now, the law is such that this level of creativity is very minimal. Anything that has even the slightest bit of creativity will satisfy this requirement. Finally, like trademarks, copyrights are not required to be registered in order to have the rights. But again there are additional rights that come with registering your copyright. It is advisable to seek registration for your copyright in order to gain the benefit of these additional rights. Let's talk about the duration of a copyright. It's one of the strongest forms of intellectual property because the duration is so long. For an individual the duration of copyright protection is the life of the owner of the copyright plus 70 years. If you're the owner of a copyright, you have their protection for all of your life and then after you die an additional 70 years of copyright protection for that work. This clock starts over when you have derivative works coming from an original work. If you have a work for hire, which is essentially your employees who may be creating copyrighted materials on behalf of your company, that's what we call a work for hire. That protection is slightly different. If it's a publication, a work for hire piece of work is protected for 95 years from the date that you publish it or the protection is 120 years from the date the work was actually created, whichever comes first. Registration. In the US, you would register your copyright with the copyright office. The US is in a treaty with other parts of the world called the Berne Convention. This allows you to get worldwide protection for your copyright by registering it with the copyright office. Just to wrap up, what can be protected by copyright? Almost anything. The idea of copyright is to protect original works of art that have been reduced to a tangible medium. Keep in mind that things like facts and ideas aren't protected by copyright, but almost anything else. Literary works, software, your marketing materials, your webpages, are protected by copyright. What rights does it provide? Copyright allow you to prevent others from producing copies of your work, distributing your work, performing your work, creating derivatives of your work. Again, this is an exclusionary right, meaning that it allows you to prevent others, not necessarily giving you the affirmative permission to practice the work itself. In terms of best practices to secure copyright protection, you may be familiar with the circled C sign used for copyright. It's best to use that in connection with any of your copyrighted material. What this does is it provides notice to the public that this work is yours and it is protected by copyright. In addition to using the circled C notation for your copyrighted works, you may also want to consider registering your copyright with the US Copyright Office in order to get worldwide protection for your copyright.
