Copyrighting Material

Britannia Duff
Period 4
Composition – Research Paper

There are a lot of people in the world that consider themselves to be artists, graphic designers, writers, web designers, painters and millions more. Everyone wants to have an original work, and we all want to stop other people from taking the our creations. So we copyright it. What is a copyright?
Copyright is a protection that covers published and unpublished literary, scientific and artistic works, whatever the form of expression, provided such works are fixed in a tangible or material form. This means that if you can see it, hear it and/or touch it - it may be protected. If it is an essay, if it is a play, if it is a song, if it is a funky original dance move, if it is a photograph, HTML coding or a computer graphic that can be set on paper, recorded on tape or saved to a hard drive, it may be protected. Copyright laws grant the creator the exclusive right to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform and display the work publicly. Exclusive means only the creator of such work, not anybody who has access to it and decides to grab it. (“What is?”)
Basically this means that copyright is a law that protects the creator from having your works stolen, edited, or reused by any person other than yourself.
So what does it mean that the idea must be tangible? You must be able to see it, touch it, hear it. You do not have to get special permission to copyright material, though you can register for it, – you must simply put it in tangible form. For example, if you were to write a poem if you printed it out and then signed it and added the copyright symbol that poem would be copyrighted to you. To protect yourself the poetry needs to be dated, this can be done by sending it to yourself in the mail or by saving it as a document on the computer as an image file. An image file saves the date the image was created under the properties of the image on the computer.

“What is Copyright?” What is Copyright Protection? 1998-2003.
Whatiscopyright.org. 16 Dec 2005 < [link] >.