Copyright protects creative works that are set in tangible form. Copyright law comes from the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.
Copyright is the right to copy. The owner of the copyright is the one that has the right to copy, as well as many other rights, such as the right of attribution. That means you have the right to be given name credit on the works you have created.
Copyright protects works such as writing, art, design, photos, movies, screenplays and stage plays, songwriting and sound recordings, computer software, and other creative works. These works must be "set in tangible form," meaning, they must be written or recorded or set on paper, etc.
Today, we register copyrights with the Electronic Copyright Office, ECo.
Copyright registration is an excellent "bang for the buck." Copyright registration has a government filing fee of about $60. Some types of groups of works can go in on one application. The Copyright registration process takes around 4 months, more or less. As a lawyer working in Copyright, I charge enough to cover the whole process -- from preparing the file and labeling it correctly, making sure it is a filed type accepted by the Copyright Office, making sure it is being categorized as the type of work it is most suited for, gathering all the practical and legal information for the application, filling out the application, and uploading the file electronically. Next, I make sure it has all been uploaded and accepted, so it is on its way. Then I check the progress about once a week. Sometimes the Copyright Registrar contacts me with some questions or concerns. Occasionally, a work is rejected by the Copyright Office and I have to see if there is any way that rejection can be turned into an acceptance. In most cases, the work is accepted and the Copyright Office registers the creative work into its database and mails out a Certificate of Copyright Registration. I keep the client informed every step of the way.
Copyright protection generally lasts for the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years. That way, the person who created the work can benefit from it for their lifetime, and after they are gone, their children and grandchildren can also benefit from it.
By creating creative works and registering them, we can create intellectual property that we can easily pass down to our loved ones or others we choose in a will or trust or other testamentary device.
There are some things that do not have copyright, such as letters and numbers and standard type characters, and fonts. Arrangements of these might have copyright. Also, works created by Artificial intelligence do not generally have copyright.
It takes several months to get a completed copyright registration. There are advantages to registering a copyright in a timely way, including the availability of statutory damages and attorney fees. If the Copyright is not registered, you do not have a possibility of statutory damages if the work is infringed, nor do you have the possibility of attorney fees. It is so extremely important to register the copyrights on your creative works.
There is nothing that takes the place of Copyright registration. There are some scams that claim to register copyrights on songs or other such things, but these are not legal and have no effect or value.
There are also some old myths, such as that mailing a written work or drawing to oneself provides Copyright protection. It does not. This is just a silly, incorrect myth with no legal substance.
Intertwined with Copyright law are other laws, such as the Visual Artists Rights Act, known as VARA, which protects certain kinds of visual arts. Artist Moral rights are part of VARA. These give a certain amount of sanctity to the art works by providing protections for the creations.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides some protections for digital creative works online. In many instances, the DMCA has been twisted to make it easier to use and abuse copyrighted works online.
Section 1202 of the DMCA of 1998 protects Copyright Management Information (CMI), and makes it illegal to intentionally remove, alter, or distribute works with altered CMI such as the title of the work, name of the author/ creator, name of copyright owner, terms of use, which can be on the surface of the art work of embedded in metadata or watermarks. This is meant to deter people or companies from removing or changing the CMI in order to engage in Copyright infringment. This law provides very generous statutory damages per violation. There can be criminal penalities up to $500,000 and 5 years in prison for a first offense.
Copyright can be a potent tool. But to make use of most of the tools, the Copyright must be registered with the US Copyright Office.
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