Copyright Material

• You cannot claim a copyright on ideas or facts.
  
• You cannot copyright familiar symbols or designs, like K or L or a smiley face.
  
• A work may be copyrighted if it is original, shows minimal creativity, and is fixed in some tangible form of expression that can be seen or heard.

Rights Acquired

• With a copyright, you control the use and copying of your creative work, the right to distribute it, display it, or perform it.
  
• A copyright owner also holds rights to derivative works, such as adapting a novel for a movie, or reinterpreting a song like the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" as a country song.
  
• The right to control public performance and display includes activities like staging the musical "Rent" at the local dinner theatre, or broadcasting any portion of a football game at any time without the prior express written consent of the National Football League. But if you want to stage the opera La Boheme, you most likely are not infringing any copyright (the work is probably too old and might not have been copyrighted in the first place).
  
• You have the right to transfer your exclusive rights or any portion of those rights to another person, but the transfer must be in writing with your signature.
  
• Rights to protected material may be given away, put into a trust,or given in a will.
  
• Rights to a protected work also may be "rented" by giving another person a license to use or copy the work. (A license is a contract granting permission to do something; your driver's license is, in a way, a contract with your state.)
  
• A transfer of copyright, including a license, must be made in writing!
  
• You can create something and not acquire any rights in it if you are creating a "work for hire."

International Protection

• Whether your copyright is good in another country will depend on that country's own copyright laws. Some countries enter into treaties with one another to protect foreign copyrights.
  
• If you are concerned about whether your copyright will be protected in a particular country, and how much protection there will be, you may want to consult a copyright lawyer.

Registering Your Copyright

• Your copyright must be registered with the United States Copyright Office before you can seek a court order to stop someone from infringing it.
  
• Your registration takes effect as soon as the Copyright Office receives all of the required items in an acceptable form, even if it takes a long time for the application to be processed.
  
• To register the copyright, you must send in a completed application form, a filing fee, and a copy of the work being registered to the Copyright Office, located at the Library of Congress (see the U.S. Copyright Office's list of current fees). The copy of your work (which the government calls a "deposit") is not returnable. It will belong to the Library of Congress.

  Note: If your work is a phonorecord, you must deposit two copies of the best edition.

• The application, fee and your deposit must be sent in the same envelope or package.
  
• If you are registering more than one work, each work must have its own application and filing fee, and the Copyright Office likes to have them all in the same package.
  
• If you do not enclose all the required items, your application will be returned.
  
• Some kinds of works have special requirements for the deposit. For example, if you are trying to register a computer program, whether it is published or not, you need to deposit one copy in source code that is visually perceptible-that means a print-out. If your program is fewer than fifty pages, you must deposit a print-out of the entire program. If your program is longer than that, you must send the first twenty-five pages of the program and the last twenty-five pages. Additional rules exist for deposits in CD-ROM format.
  
• Other special deposit requirements exist for
  • movies
  • literary, dramatic, or musical work published only as a phonorecord
  • works formatted on a CD-ROM
  • works that exist in three dimensions
  • works of visual art, like greeting cards or fabric patterns
  • oversized items
  • video games
  • automated databases
  • contributions to collective works
  • serial works