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What is Copyright?
Before you go any further you need to know that there is no official
register for copyright. It is an unregistered right (unlike patents,
registered designs or trade marks).
So, there is no official action to take, (no application to make,
forms to fill in or fees to pay). Copyright comes into effect
immediately, as soon as something that can be protected is created
and "fixed" in some way, eg on paper, on film, via sound
recording, as an electronic record on the internet, etc.
It is a good idea for you to mark your copyright work with the
copyright symbol © followed by your name and the date, to
warn others against copying it, but it is not legally
necessary in the UK.
The type of works that copyright protects are:
original literary works, e.g. novels, instruction manuals, computer
programs, lyrics for songs, articles in newspapers, some types
of databases, but not names or titles (see Trade
Marks pages at the UK Patent Office for information about
registered and unregistered trade marks);
original dramatic works, including works of dance or
mime;
original musical works;
original artistic works, e.g. paintings, engravings,
photographs, sculptures, collages, works of architecture, technical
drawings, diagrams, maps, logos;
published editions of works, i.e. the typographical arrangement
of a publication;
sound recordings, which may be recordings on any medium,
e.g. tape or compact disc, and may be recordings of other copyright
works, e.g. musical or literary;
films, including videos; and
broadcasts.
So the above works are protected by copyright, regardless of the
medium in which they exist and this includes the internet. You
should also note that copyright does not protect ideas.
It protects the way the idea is expressed in a piece of work,
but it does not protect the idea itself.
For more information about copyright you can:
visit the Government’s
IP Portal web site which has much more information about copyright
and related rights and many useful links.
Look at the Copyright
in Detail section at the UK Patent Office site.
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