Prior to crowdSPRING, I was a lawyer for 13 years – focusing on complex commercial and intellectual property litigation. This is the first in what will be a regular feature in our blog discussing important legal issues that impact every small business.

What is Copyright?

Copyright is a form of legal protection provided to those who create original works. Under the 1976 Copyright Act (United States), the copyright owner has the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display the work. Any or all of these rights can be licensed, sold or donated to another party. One does not need to register a work with the U.S. Copyright Office for it to be automatically protected by copyright law (registration does have benefits – but we won’t be covering those in this article).

Copyright laws around the world can differ in significant ways. Most countries are signatories to various International treaties and agreements governing copyright protection (such as the Berne Copyright Convention). Under the Berne Copyright Convention, if your work is protected by copyright in your own country, then your work is protected by copyright in every other country that signed the Berne Copyright Convention.

What does Copyright protect?

Copyright protects works such as poetry, movies, writing, music, video games, videos, plays, paintings, sheet music, recorded music performances, novels, software code, sculptures, photographs, choreography, and architectural designs.

To be protected by copyright, a work must be “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” This means that the work must exist in physical form for at least some period of time. A tangible medium includes paper (even a napkin will do!) and digital forms of storage. Additionally, the work must be original. It doesn’t matter if the work is similar to existing works, and copyright law is blind to whether the work is good or bad – so long as the work is original, it is protected by copyright. Finally, a work must be the result of at least some creative effort by the author.

Copyright doesn’t protect an idea, system or process (you would need to obtain patent protection for those). So, for example, if your small business is creating software programs, you would generally be unable to protect under copyright law the algorithms, methods, systems, ideas or functions of software (your code, however, is protected – nobody can sell or distribute your code without your permission).

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