Copyright ©
If I designed an original website with all original content, can I just say that it is copyrighted by me? Doesn't the fact that I put it online in the first place prove that I am its owner?
If you don't copyright a website, what can happen?
If I decide to copyright, can I just copyright it in my own name? (don't want to incorporate or any of that) Can I establish a business name (just a variation of my birthname)?
Re: Copyright ©
Copyright is automatic. You don't need to slap a © symbol up or do anything else. If you write it, paint it, compose it, film it, or do whatever else (artistic instead of technological), the copyright is yours.Originally posted by bookbuster
However, registration in the US is mandatory before pursuing a court case. Moreover, if you don't register your copyright promptly, and you wait until after infringement occurs, then you can't pursue statutory damages or attorney's fees. You'll only be rewarded actual damages, which you'll have to demonstrate. On top of that, ownership of the copyright is pretty much already established if it's registered in advance, whereas you'll need to pony up proof if it comes to a court case and you didn't pre-register.
On the other hand, there's a cost to registration. Plus paperwork. If you're interested in the other legal remedies that registration offers, you might research the deadlines and decide how often you would like to register any new material you put on your website. Annually? Biannually? Never? You don't actually need to take the step to register--the copyright is yours already--so you can decide for yourself the likelihood that your witty online scribblings might be yoinked sometime in the future, and how hard you'd like to bring the hammer down if that happens.
Re: Copyright ©
Copyright can be owned by an ordinary person or by a corporation -- there's no need to incorporate.
You can run a business under a business name, but you will need to register that as a trade name, and might (depending on your state) need to register as a business name. With trade marks and trade names, you need to keep clear of others using the same or similar mark/name in the same or similar market. So, if you were Sam MacDonald, there might be a corporation (with a trade mark consisting of golden arches) that might object to you registering a business name "MacDonald's Restaurant and Tavern" -- even though it includes your real name.
Re: Copyright ©
Great information,
thanks!
Re: Copyright ©
A couple of additional notes: What copyright does is to guarantee your intellectual ownership of the arrangement of words, pixels, lines, paint, musical notes, etc. that you created -- or anything so closely similar as to be effectively the same. (You can't, for example, take someone else's copyrighted book, change "the" to "that" on page 53, and consider it a new work. You can't rearrange 'Yesterday' into the key of A flat and call it a new work.) But the poem, essay, novel, pencil sketch of a giant tarantula menacing a bunny rabbit that you produced -- those are your original, copyrighted works.
You cannot copyright ideas. This comes up quite often -- your idea may be original, but it is not in itself a creative work. Though copyright is an intangible property right, it is tied to something physical -- words on paper, paint on canvas, etc. Writing a story about the last man and woman alive after a cataclysm, who turn out to be, surprise!, Adam and Eve -- that's purely an idea until you put it into a story told in words. (It's also been done -- and done, and done, and....)
Distinguish copyright from trademarks, service marks, and patents. They're all species of intellectual property -- but they're different kinds of intellectual property. (I do not want to try to do an exhaustive contrasting definition here -- the differences should be clear if you simply look up the definitions.)
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