22 Feb Copyright

Copyright

Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States for original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, architectural, cartographic, choreographic, pantomimic, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, and audiovisual creations. Copyright means the right to copy, but has come to mean that body of exclusive rights granted by law to owners of copyrights for protection of their work. The owner of copyrights on a work has the exclusive right to control how their work is copied, produced and distributed and can prevent others from taking action with respect to the work. The owner may sell the copyright or license it to others. Copyrights are one of the four main types of intellectual property. Copyrights, which concerns control over artistic works, differs from patent, which grants protections to inventors for their inventions, trademark, which deals with the ability to exclude other from using certain words and symbols in commerce, and trade secrets, which are proprietary business concepts of a company. Copyrights arise in a work at the moment is reduced to a fixed medium by an author. However, an author cannot sue to prevent infringement of the copyrights until they are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or court. The term of copyrights are the life of the author plus 70, 95 or 120 years, depending on the nature of authorship.