The role of copyright in the flow of research is undergoing dramatic and exciting change. The options for scholarly communication have never been broader or more effective. You'll find discussion of copyright woven all through important aspects of research and teaching, such as:
Copyrightable expression is original authorship, fixed in a tangible medium of expression.
Examples of copyrightable expression, assuming they are original, could be: poetry; prose; software applications; artwork; musical notation; recorded music and/or song; animations; video; a web page; blog posts and comments; architectural drawings; or photographs.
Examples that do not qualify as copyrightable expression: facts; exact duplications of public domain works; ideas; systems; works created by employees of the Federal Government; titles and short phrases; logos and slogans; or forms that only collect information (rather than provide information).
Protecting your work is easy today. It's protected from the moment you hit the save key on your computer, touch your pencil to paper, brush to canvas, etc. Works are protected from the moment of their fixation in a tangible medium of protection. This means that notes taken during a lecture enjoy the full force of federal copyright law for the life of the author plus 70 years.
If you want to go the extra mile to make sure you can enforce your rights in federal court, you'll need to register your automatic copyright with the Copyright Office. You can learn all you need to know to register copyrights at the Copyright Office's website. It's relatively inexpensive and fast, but it's only necessary if you think it likely that you would sue someone to stop an infringement of your rights.
This page has been reworked from content from Copyright Crash Course created by Georgia Harper at the University of Texas, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
