Copyright Basics

If you're an artist--musician, writer, painter, film maker, or whatever--you're lucky. Your work falls under the protection of copyright law, and copyrights are, for the most part, automatic, simple, and powerful.*

Author's Note: check out http://www.copyright.gov

Thanks to the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, whatever you create is protected at the moment of fixation (that is, whenever you commit it to paper, film, or other "tangible form"), and that protection will last for your lifetime plus fifty years, with no renewal needed or allowed. (Before 1976, copyrights were for twenty-eight years, with a twenty-eight year renewal.)

(Work for hire and corporate owned copyrights - where the "life" of the corporation may be infinite - will be covered later).

[note: rights in ephemeral art such as, for example dance - which may, depending on the choreographer, not be fixed in any media, are another interesting question...keep reading future blog entries to find out more!]

A copyright lets you keep anyone else from either reproducing your work or making a derivative work (say, a movie from a short story) without your permission.

That automatic copyright exists whether or not you have a copyright symbol - the "C" in a circle -or other copyright notice on the work.

Excerpted in part from
The Great American Idea Book
W.W. Norton
copyright Bob Coleman & Deborah Neville